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IN    THE    FOOTPRINTS    OF 
CHARLES    LAMB 


lllli:i{!lliJL!;;lllllllll!:ri!llliilllllilli 

CHARLPS    LAMB. 


IN  THE    FOOTPRINTS   OF 
CHARLES    LAMB 


BY 

Benjamin  Ellis  Martin 

AUTHOR    OF    "old    CHELSEA,"    ETC. 


ILLUSTRATED    BY    HERBERT    RAILTON 
AND    JOHN    FULLEYLOVE 


WITH    A    BIBLIOGRAPHY    BY  E.  D.  NORTH 


NEW    YORK 

CHARLES    SCRIBNER'S    SONS 

1890 


Copyright,  i8qo,   bv 
CHARLES  SCRIBNER'S  SONS. 


Press  of  J.  J.  Little   &    Co. 
Astor  Place,  New  York. 


TO 

L  H.  F. 


During  the  half-century  smce  the  death  of  Charles 
Lamb^  an  immense  mass  of  matter  has  been  gathered 
about  him  and  about  his  writings.  In  burrowing 
among  the  treasures  and  the  7'ubbish  of  this  mound,  I 
have  been  struck  by  the  total  absence  of  what  fnay  be 
called  a  topographical  biography  of  the  man,  or  of  any 
accurate  record  of  his  rovings  :  with  the  exception  of 
that  necessarily  brief  one  contained  in  Mr.  Laurence 
Huttons  invaluable  "  Literary  Landmarks  of  Lon- 
don." Such  a  shortcoming  is  the  more  marked,  inas- 
much as  Lamb  is  so  closely  idetitified  with  the  Town. 
Not  one  among  the  men  of  letters,  whose  shadows  walk 
the  London  streets  with  us,  knew  them  better,  or  loved 
thcfn  more,  than  he  did.  In  following  his  footsteps, 
I  have  found  still  untouched  many  of  the  houses  that 
hai'boured  him  ;  and  I  have  taken  delight  in  the  task, 
before  the  restless  hand  of  reconstricctiofi  shall  have 
plucked  them  forever  away,  of  helping  to  keep  alive  the 
look  of  all  that  is  left  of  the  tvalls  within  which  he 
lived  and  laboured. 

Frofti  this  mere  meitiento  of  brie k-and-mor tar — all 
my  original  intent — /  have  been  led  on  to  a  study  of 


the  man  himself,  frofn  our  fnore  f?wdern  and  more 
humane  point  of  view.  The  time  has  long  gotie  by  for 
that  kindly  compact  of  reticence  which  may  have  been 
becoming  in  the  years  directly  after  his  death.  Nothing 
need  be  hidden  now  about  the  madness  of  Ma?y,  about 
the  terrible  taking-off  of  her  mother,  about  the  early 
insanity  of  Charles  himself,  or  his  later  weaknesses. 
And,  in  telling  the  entire  truth,  I  have  found  comfort 
and  cheer  in  the  belief  that  neither  apology  nor  ho77iily 
can  ever  again  be  deemed  needful  to  a  decorous  de- 
meanour beside  these  dead. 

So  that  I  have  sketched  hiiti  fust  as  he  lives  for  me — 
the  lines  ajid  the  wrinkles  of  his  aspect,  the  shine  ajid 
the  shadow  of  his  soul :  fust  as  he  moved  in  the  crowd, 
among  his  friends,  by  his  sister  s  side,  and  alone.  To 
show  exactly  what  he  was,  rather  than  what  he  did,  I 
have  used  his  own  words  wherever  this  was  possible  ; 
alteritig  them  as  to  their  letter  alone,  where  it  has 
seemed  essential.  In  this  spirit  of  affectionate  allegiance 
I  have  followed  him  faithfully  in  all  his  wanderi7igs, 
fro7n  his  cradle  close  by  the  Thames  to  his  grave  not 
far  from  the  Lea. 

B.  E.  M. 

Nf.JV  York,  October,  1890. 


List  of  Illustrations. 

Charles  Lamb,  ....  Frontispiece 

PAGE 

The  Temple  Gardetis,  from  Crown  Office  Roiv,         1 4 
By  John  Fidleylove. 

A  Corner  in  the  Blue-Coat  School,     .         .         .18 
By  Herbert  Railton. 

The  East  India  House,      .         .         .         .         .26 
By  Herbert  Railton. 

No.  7  Little  Queen  Street,  .         .  .  -32 

The  House  in  Pentonville,  .         .         .  •       39 

The  Feathers  Tavern,       .....       48 
By  Herbert  Railton. 

No.  20  Russell  Street,  Covent  Garden,      .         .       78 
By  Herbert  Railton. 

The  Cottage  in  Colebrook  Row,  ...       96 

By  Herbert  Railton. 


List  of  Illustrations. 

PAGE 

Lamb's  two  Houses  at  Enfield,  .         .         =102 

By  John  Fulleylove. 

No.  34  Southampton  Buildings,  .         .         .122 

By  Herbert  Railtoji. 

Charles  Lamb — the  Maclise  Portrait,         .  .      126 

Facsimile  of  a  Receipt  for  a  Legacy,       .         .     128 
Signed  by  Charles  Lamb  as  Guardian  for 
his  Sister  Mary. 

The  IValden  House  at  Edmonton,      .  .  .130 

By  John  Fulleylove. 

Edmonton  Church,  frotn  Lamb's  Grave,      .         ,136 
By  John  Fulleylove. 

The  Grave  of  Charles  and  Mary  Anne  Latnb  at 

Edmonton,  .  .         .         .         .         .140 

By  John  Fulleylove. 


'^V,'^^-^^- 

^  ?^^ 


WW-t 


"  The  sun  set  ;  but  set  not  his  hope  : 
Stars  rose  ;  his  faith  was  earlier  up  : 
Fixed  on  the  enormous  galaxy, 
Deeper  and  older  seemed  his  eye  : 
And  matched  his  sufferance  sublime 
The  taciturnity  of  time. 
He  spoke,  and  words  more  soft  than  rain 
Brought  the  Age  of  Gold  again  : 
His  action  won  such  reverence  sweet, 
As  hid  all  measure  of  the  feat." 

— Emerson. 


"  Far  from  me,  and  from  my  friends,  be  such 
frigid  philosophy  as  may  conduct  us,  indifferent 
and  unmoved,  over  any  ground,  which  has  been 
dignified  by  wisdom,  bravery,  or  virtue." 

— Samuel  Johnson. 


I. 


p-  U  C  H    is    the    legend 
that  catches  one's  eye, 


plain  for  all  men  to 
see,  on  many  a  hoard- 
ing in  London  streets.  Be- 
hind those  boards,  wide  or 
high,  on  which  the  callous  contractor  shame- 
lessly blazons  his  dreadful  trade — "  Old  Houses 
Bought  to  be  Pulled  Down  " — he  is  stupidly 
pickaxing  to  pieces  historic  bricks  and  mortar 
which  ought  to  be  preserved  priceless  and  im- 
perishable. Within  only  a  few  years,  I  have  had 
to  look  on,  while  thus  were  broken  to  bits  and 
carted  away  to  chaos  John  Dryden's  dwelling- 
place  in  Fetter  Lane,  Benjamin  Franklin's  and 
Washington  Irving's  lodgings  in  Little  Britain, 
Byron's  birthplace  in  HoUis  Street,  Milton's 
"  pretty  garden-house,"  in  Petty  France,  West- 


4  Footprints  of  Charles  Lamb. 

minster.  The  spacious  fireplace  by  which  the 
poet  sat,  during  his  fast-darkening  days — for 
in  this  house  he  lost  his  first  wife  and  his  eye- 
sight— was  knocked  down,  as  only  one  among 
other  numbered  lots,  to  stolid  builders.  And 
the  stone,  "  Sacred  to  Milton,  the  Prince  of 
Poets" — placed  in  the  wall  facing  the  garden, 
by  William  Hazlitt,  living  here  early  in  our 
century,  beneath  which  Jeremy  Bentham,  occu- 
pant of  the  adjoining  house,  was  wont  to  make 
his  guests  fall  on  their  knees — this  stone  has 
gone  to  "  patch  a  wall  to  expel  the  winter's 
flaw." 

To  this  house  there  used  to  come,  to  call  on 
Hazlitt,  a  man  of  noticeable  and  impressive 
presence : — small  of  stature,  fragile  of  frame, 
clad  in  clothing  of  tightly  fitting  black,  which 
was  clerical  as  to  cut  and  well-worn  as  to  tex- 
ture ;  his  "  almost  immaterial  legs,"  in  Tom 
Hood's  phrase,  ending  in  gaiters  and  straps; 
his  dark  hair,  not  quite  black,  curling  crisply 
about  a  noble  head  and  brow  —  "a  head 
worthy  of  Aristotle,"  Leigh  Hunt  tells  us ; 
"  full  of  dumb  eloquence,"  are  Hazlitt's  words; 
"  such  only  may  be  seen  in  the  finer  portraits 


Footprints  of  Charles  Lamb.  5 


of  Titian,"  John  Forster  puts  it ;  "a  long, 
melancholy  face,  with  keen  penetrating  eyes," 
we  learn  from  Barry  Cornwall ;  brown  eyes, 
kindly,  quick,  observant  ;  his  dark  complexion 
and  grave  expression  brightened  by  the  fre- 
quent "sweet  smile,  with  a  touch  of  sadness 
in  it." 

This  visitor,  of  such  peculiar  and  piquant 
personality — externally  "  a  rare  composition  of 
the  Jew,  the  gentleman,  and  the  angel,"  to  use 
his  own  words  of  the  singer  Braham — is  Charles 
Lamb,  a  clerk  in  the  East  India  House,  living 
with  his  sister  Mary  in  chambers  in  the  Inner 
Temple.  Let  us  walk  with  him  as  he  returns  to 
those  peaceful  precincts,  still  of  signal  interest, 
despite  the  ruin  wrought  by  recent  improve- 
ments. Here,  as  in  the  day  of  Spenser,  "stu- 
dious lawyers  have  their  bowers,"  and  "  have 
thriven ;  "  here,  on  every  hand,  we  see  the 
shades  of  Evelyn,  Congreve,  Cowper,  the 
younger  Colman,  Fielding,  Goldsmith,  John- 
son, Boswell  ;  here,  above  all,  the  atmosphere 
is  still  redolent  with  sweet  memories  of  the 
"best  beloved  of  English  writers,"  as  Algernon 
Swinburne    well    calls    Charles    Lamb.       Closer 


6  Footprints  of  Charles  Lamb. 

and  more  compact  than  elsewhere  are  his  foot- 
prints in  these  Temple  grounds  ;  for  he  was 
born  within  their  gates,  his  youthful  world  was 
bounded  by  their  walls,  his  happiest  years,  as 
boy  and  as  man,  were  passed  in  their  buildings. 
And  out  beyond  these  borders  we  shall  track 
his  steps  mainly  through  adjacent  streets,  al- 
most always  along  the  City's  streets,  of  which 
he  was  as  fond  as  Samuel  Johnson  or  Charles 
Dickens.  He  loved,  all  through  life,  "  enchant- 
ing London,  whose  dirtiest,  drab-frequented 
alley,  and  her  lowest -bowing  tradesman,  I  would 
not  exchange  for  Skiddaw,  Helvellyn 
O  !  her  lamps  of  a  night  !  her  rich  goldsmiths, 
print-shops,  toy-shops,  mercers,  hardware  men, 
pastry-cooks,  St.  Paul's  Churchyard,  the  Strand, 
Exeter  'Change,  Charing  Cross,  with  the  man 
tipo)i  a  black  horse !  These  are  thy  gods,  O 
London!"  He  couldn't  care,  he  said,  for  the 
beauties  of  nature,  as  they  have  been  confinedly 
called  ;  and  used  to  persist,  with  his  pleasing 
perversity,  that  when  he  climbed  Skiddaw  he 
was  thinking  of  the  ham-and-beef  shop  in  St. 
Martin's  Lane!  "  Have  I  not  enough  without 
your  mountains?"  he    wrote    to    Wordsworth. 


Footprints  of  Charles  Lamb.  7 

"  I  do  not  envy  you.  I  should  pity  you,  did  1 
not  know  that  the  mind  will  make  friends  with 
anything  " — even  with  scenery  !  It  was  a  serious 
step  which  Lamb  took  in  later  life,  out  from  his 
beloved  streets  into  the  country  ;  a  step  which 
certainly  saddened,  and  doubtless  shortened,  the 
last  stage  of  his  earthly  journey. 

By  a  happy  chance — for  they  have  an  unhal- 
lowed habit  in  London  town  of  destroying  just 
those  buildings  which  I  should  select  to  save, 
leaving  unmolested  those  that  would  not  be 
missed,  for  all  they  ever  have  to  say  to  us — 
nearly  every  one  of  Lamb's  successive  homes 
has  been  rescued  from  ruin,  and  kept  inviolate 
for  our  reverent  regard.  "  Cheerful  Crown 
Ofifice  Row  (place  of  my  kindly  engendure)  " — 
to  use  his  own  words — has  been  only  partly 
rebuilt ;  and  that  end  of  the  block  wherein  lived 
his  parents  stands  almost  in  the  same  state  as 
when  it  was  erected  in  1737  ;  this  date  told  to 
us  to-day  by  the  old-fashioned  figures  cut  on 
its  easterly  end.  Tt  was  then  named  "  The  New 
Building,  opposite  the  Garden-Wall,"  and  under 
that  division  of  the  Chamber-Book  of  the  Inner 
Temple   I   have  hunted  up   its  numerous  occu- 


8  Footprints  of  Charles  Lamb. 


pants.  By  this  archive,  and  by  the  Books  of 
Accounts  for  the  eighteenth  century,  I  have 
thus  been  enabled  to  trace  Samuel  Salt  from 
his  first  residence  within  the  Temple  in  1746,  in 
Ram  Alley  Building — now  gone — through  suc- 
cessive removals,  until  he  settled  down  in  his 
last  chambers,  wherein  he  died  in  February, 
1793.  The  record  reads — a  "parliament" 
meaning  one  of  the  fixed  meetings  in  each  term 
of  the  Benchers  of  the  Temple,  for  the  purpose 
of  transacting  business,  and  of  calHng  students 
to  the  bar—"  13th  May,  1768.  At  this  Parlia- 
ment :  It  is  ordered  that  Samuel  Salt,  Esquire, 
a  Barrister  of  this  Society,  aged  about  Fifty,  be 
and  is  hereby  admitted,  for  his  own  life,  to  the 
benefit  of  an  Assignment  in  and  to  All  that 
Ground  Chamber,  No.  2,  opposite  the  Garden 
Walk  in  Crown  Office  Row  :  He,  the  said 
Samuel  Salt  having  paid  for  the  Purchase 
thereof  into  the  Treasury  of  this  Society,  the 
sum  of  One  Hundred  and  Fifty  pounds." 

So  that  it  was  in  No.  2 — the  numbers  having 
rehiained  always  unchanged — of  Crown  Office 
Row,  in  one  of  the  rear  rooms  of  the  ground 
floor,  which  then  looked  out    on    Inner  Temple 


Footprints  of  Charles  Lamb.  9 

Lane,  some  of  which  rooms  have  been  swept 
away  since,  and  others  have  been  sHghtly  al- 
tered, that  Charles  Lamb  was  born,  on  the  loth 
February,  1775. 

For  Samuel  Salt,  Esquire — one  of  "  The  Old 
Benchers  of  the  Inner  Temple,"  whose  pensive 
gentility  is  portrayed  in  Elia's  essay  of  that 
title — had  in  his  employ,  as  "  his  clerk,  his  good 
servant,  his  dresser,  his  friend,  his  '  flapper,'  his 
guide,  stop-watch,  auditor,  treasurer,"  one  John 
Lamb;  who  formed,  with  his  wife  and  children, 
the  greater  part  of  the  household.  Of  him,  too, 
under  the  well-chosen  name  of  Lovel,  we  have 
the  portrait,  vivid  and  rounded,  in  his  son's 
paper.  "  He  was  a  man  of  an  incorrigible  and 
losing  honesty.  A  good  fellow  withal  and 
'would  strike.'  In  the  cause  of  the  oppressed 
he  never  considered  inequalities,  or  calculated 
the  number  of  his  opponents.  .  .  .  Lovel  was 
the  liveliest  little  fellow  breathing,  had  a  face 
as  gay  as  Garrick's,  whom  he  was  said  greatly 
to  resemble  (I  have  a  portrait  of  him  which 
confirms  it),  possessed  a  fine  turn  for  humor- 
ous poetry — next  to  Swift  and  Prior — moulded 
heads  in  clay  or  plaster  of  Paris  to  admiration, 


10  Footprints  of  Charles  Lamb. 


by  the  dint  of  natural  genius  merely  ;  turned 
cribbage-boards  and  such  small  cabinet  toys,  to 
perfection  ;  took  a  hand  at  quadrille  or  bowls 
with  equal  facility;  made  punch  better  than 
any  man  of  his  degree  in  England  ;  had  the 
merriest  quips  and  conceits,  and  was  altogether 
as  brimful  of  rogueries  and  inventions  as  you 
could  desire.  He  was  a  brother  of  the  angle, 
moreover,  and  just  such  a  free,  hearty,  honest 
companion  as  Mr.  Izaak  Walton  Avould  have 
chosen  to  go  a-fishing  with."     In  truth, 

"  A  merry  cheerful  man.      A  merrier  man, 
A  man  more  apt  to  frame  matter  for  mirth. 
Mad  jokes  and  antics  for  a  Christmas-eve, 
Making  life  social,  and  the  laggard  time 
To  move  on  nimbly,  never  yet  did  cheer 
The  little  circle  of  domestic  friends." 

This  John  Lamb  was  devoted  to  the  welfare 
of  his  master,  Samuel  Salt;  who,  in  turn,  did 
nothing  without  consulting  him,  or  failed  in 
anything  without  expecting  and  fearing  his  ad- 
monishing. "  He  put  himself  almost  too  much 
in  his  hands,  had  they  not  been  the  purest  in 
the  world."  To  him  and  to  his  children  Salt 
was  a  life-long  benefactor,  and  never,  until  death 


Footprints  of  Charles  Lamb.  1 1 


had  made  an  end  to  the  good  man's  good 
deeds,  did  there  fall  on  the  family  any  shadow 
of  change  or  trouble  or  penury. 

It  was  in  Salt's  chambers  that  Charles  and 
his  sister  Mary,  in  their  youthful  years,  "tum- 
bled into  a  spacious  closet  of  good  old  English 
reading,  and  browsed  at  will  on  that  fair  and 
wholesome  pasturage :  "  thus  already  so  early 
drawn  together  by  kindred  tastes  and  studies, 
even  as  they  were  already  at  one  in  their  joint 
heritage  of  the  father's  latent  mental  malady. 
They  had  learned  their  letters,  and  picked  up 
crumbs  of  rudimentary  knowledge,  at  a  small 
school  in  Fetter  Lane,  hard  by  the  Temple; 
the  boys  being  taught  in  the  mornings,  the  girls 
in  the  afternoons.  It  stood  on  the  edge  of  "  a 
discoloured,  dingy  garden  in  the  passage  lead- 
ing into  Fetter  Lane  from  Bartlett's  buildings. 
This  was  near  to  Holborn."  Bartlett's  name  is 
still  kept  alive  in  Bartlett's  Passage,  right  there  ; 
but  no  stone  of  his  building  now  stands;  and 
the  only  growth  of  any  garden  in  that  turbu- 
lent thoroughfare  to-day  is  pavement  and  mud 
and  obscene  urchins. 

The    inscription    painted    over    their    school- 


12  Footprints  of  Charles  Lamb. 


door  asserted  that  it  was  kept  by  "  Mr.  Will- 
iam Bird,  Teacher  of  Mathematics  and  Lan- 
guages." "  Heaven  knows  what  languages  were 
taught  in  it,  then!  I  am  sure  that  neither  my 
sister  nor  myself  brought  any  out  of  it,  but  a 
little  of  our  native  English  " — so  Charles  wrote 
nearly  fifty  years  after  to  William  Hone,  the 
editor  of  the  Every  Day  Book.  In  its  pages 
had  just  appeared  a  woful  narrative  of  the 
poverty  and  desolation  of  one  Starkey,  who 
had  been  "  a  gentle  usher"  in  that  school.  In 
the  letter  written  by  Lamb  as  a  pendant  to 
that  paper,  he  gossips  characteristically  about 
the  memories  of  those  school-days  thus  awak- 
ened in  him  and  in  his  sister.  He  vividly 
portrays  that  down-trodden  and  downcast 
usher,  who  "was  not  always  the  abject  thing 
he  came  to ;  "  and  who  actually  had  bold  and 
figurative  words  for  the  big  girls,  when  they 
talked  together,  or  teased  him  during  his  recita- 
tions. "Oh,  how  I  remember  our  legs  wedged 
into  those  uncomfortable  sloping  desks,  where 
we  sat  elbowing  each  other ;  and  the  injunc- 
tions to  attain  a  free  hand,  unattainable  in 
that  position !" 


Footprints  of  Charles  Lamb.  13 


They  had,  also,  an  aged  school-dame  here, 
who  was  proud  to  prattle  to  her  pupils  about 
her  aforetime  friend,  Oliver  Goldsmith ;  tell- 
ing them  how  the  good-natured  man,  then  too 
poor  to  present  her  with  a  copy  of  his  "  De- 
serted Village,"  had  lent  it  to  her  to  read. 
He  had  become  famous  now,  and  so  afflu- 
ent— by  the  success  of  "The  Good  Natur'd 
Man,"  indeed  ! — that  he  had  bought  chambers 
on  the  second  floor  of  No.  2  Brick  Court, 
Middle  Temple.  This  was  but  a  biscuit  toss 
from  Crown  Office  Row,  and  perchance  little 
Mary  Lamb  sometimes  met,  within  the 
grounds,  the  short,  stout,  plain,  pock-marked 
Irish  doctor.  He  died  in  those  chambers, 
only  ten  months  before  the  birth  of  Charles ; 
and  was  buried  somewhere  in  the  burying- 
ground  of  the  Temple  church.  Within  it,  the 
Benchers  put  up  a  tablet  to  his  memory.  It  is 
now  in  their  vestry,  wherein  you  shall  also  find 
the  baptismal  records  of  nearly  all  the  Lamb 
children.  The  inscription  on  the  tablet  may 
have  been  first  spelled  out  by  Mary  to  her 
small  and  eager  brother.  Doubtless  the  two 
children    knew  the    exact  spot    of   his  grave — 


14  Footprints  of  Charles  Lamb. 


known  exactly  to  none  of  us  to-day — even  as 
they  knew  every  corner  and  cranny  of  the 
Temple  grounds  and  buildings.  They  played 
in  its  gardens,  and  looked  down  on  them  from 
these  same  upper  windows  of  No.  2  Crown 
Office  Row,  which  have  been  selected  by  Mr. 
Fulleylove  for  his  point  of  view.  Then  these 
gardens  were  as  Shakespeare  saw  them,  when 
he,  by  a  blameless  anachronism,  caused  to  be 
enacted  in  them  the  famous  scene  of  the 
Roses ;  really  rehearsed  there,  years  before, 
when  Warwick  assigned  the  rose  to  Planta- 
genet.  Now,  the  grounds  have  been  extended 
riverwards  by  the  construction  of  the  Embank- 
ment ;  and  the  ancient  historic  blocks  of  build- 
ings about  them  have  been  vulgarized  into 
something  new  and  fine. 

Mary  and  Charles  were  always  together 
during  these  early  days.  Of  the  seven  children 
born  into  the  family,  only  three  escaped  death 
in  infancy :  our  two,  and  their  brother  John, 
elder  by  two  years  than  Mary.  Their  mother 
loved  them  all,  but  most  of  all  did  she  love 
"  dear,  little,  selfish,  craving  John ; "  who,  as 
was  well  written  by  Charles   in  later  life,  was 


^ 


^1  I'M 


THE   TEMPLE   GARDENS,  FROM    CROWN    OFFICE    ROW. 


Footprints  of  Charles  Lamb.  15 


not  worthy  of  one-tenth  of  that  affection  which 
Mary  had  a  right  to  claim.  But  the  mother, 
like  the  father,  was  fond  of  fun,  and  found  her 
favourite  in  her  handsome,  sportive,  noisy  boy  ; 
showing  scant  sympathy  with  and  no  insight 
into  the  "  moythered  brains  " — her  own  phrase 
— of  her  sensitive,  brooding  daughter,  who 
already  gave  unheeded  evidence  of  the  con- 
genital gloom  by  which  her  mind  was  to 
become  so  clouded.  Another  member  of  the 
small  household  was  the  father's  queer  old- 
maiden  sister.  Aunt  Hetty,  who  passed  her 
days  sitting  silently  or  mumbling  mysteriously 
as  she  peered  over  her  spectacles  at  the  two 
children,  huddled  together  in  their  youthful 
fear  of  her. 

So  it  came  to  pass  that  Mary  took  charge  of 
the  "  weakly  but  very  pretty  babe  " — as  she  re- 
called him,  long  years  after,  when  he  lay  dead 
at  Edmonton,  and  she,  in  the  next  room,  was 
rambling  disjointedly  on  about  all  their  past. 
With  a  childish  wisdom,  born,  surely,  not  of 
her  years,  but  rather  of  her  loneliness  and  her 
unrequited  caresses  and  her  craving  for  com- 
panionship, she  became  at   once   his  big  sister, 


i6  Footprints  of  Charles  Lamb. 


his  Httle  mother,  his  guardian  angel.  She  cared 
for  him  in  his  helpless  babyhood,  she  gave 
strength  to  his  feeble  frame,  she  nurtured 
his  growing  brain,  she  taught  him  to  talk  and 
to  walk.     We  seem  to  see  the  tripping  of  his 

feet,  that 

" half  linger, 

Half  run  before," 

trying  to  keep  pace  with  her  steps  then  ;  even 
as  they  always  all  through  life  tried  to  do, 
wheresoever  she  walked,  until  they  stopped  at 
the  edge  of  his  grave.  The  story  of  these  two 
lives  of  double  singleness,  from  these  childish 
footprints  to  that  grave,  is  simply  the  story  of 
their  love.  He,  like  his  own  Child-Angel,  was 
to  know  weakness  and  reliance  and  the  shadow 
of  human  imbecility  ;  and  he  was  to  go  with  a 
lame  gait  ;  bjit,  in  his  goings,  he  "  exceeded  all 
mortal  children  in  grace  and  swiftness^  And 
so  pity  springs  up  in  us,  as  in  angelic  bosoms  ; 
and  yearnings  touch  us,  too,  at  the  memory  of 
this  "immortal  lame  one." 

The  boy's  next  school,  to  which  he  obtained  a 
presentation  through  the  influence  of  Mr.  Salt, 
is  known  officially  as  Christ's  Hospital,  and  is 


Footprints  of  Charles  Lamb.  17 


commonly  called  the  Blue-Coat  School.  It  still 
stands,  a  stately  monument  of  the  munificence 
of  ''  that  godly  and  royal  child,  King  Edward 
VI.,  the  flower  of  the  Tudor  name — the  young 
flower  that  was  untimely  cropped,  as  it  began 
to  fill  our  land  with  its  early  odours — the  boy- 
patron  of  boys — the  serious  and  holy  child, 
who  walked  with  Cranmer  and  Ridley."  To- 
day, as  we  stay  our  steps  in  Newgate  Street, 
and  peer  through  the  iron  railings  at  the  dingy 
red  brick  and  stone  facings  of  the  ancient  walls ; 
or,  as  we  pause  under  the  tiny  statue  of  the 
boy-king — founder,  only  ten  days  before  his 
death,  of  this  noble  hospital  for  poor  fatherless 
children  and  foundlings — we  may  look  at  the 
out-of-school  games  going  on  in  the  great  quad- 
rangle :  the  foolish  flapping  skirts  of  the  strip- 
lings tucked  into  their  red  leathern  waistbands 
to  give  fair  and  free  play  to  their  lanky  yellow 
legs,  their  uncapped  heads  taking  sun  or  shower 
with  equal  unconcern. 

Among  them,  unseen  of  them,  seem  to  move 
the  forms  of  those  other  boys,  Charles  Lamb, 
Samuel  Taylor  Coleridge,  and  Leigh  Hunt — 
all  students  here    about    this   time.      Our  boy 


1 8  Footprints  of  Charles  Lamb. 

was  then  a  little  past  seven,  a  gentle,  affec- 
tionate lad,  "  terribly  shy,"  as  he  said  of  him- 
self later,  and  made  all  the  r^ore  sensitive 
by  his  slight  stammer,  which  lapsed  to  a  stut- 
ter when  his  nerves  were  wrought  upon  and 
startled.  Yet  he  was  no  more  left  alone  and 
isolated  now  than  he  was  in  after  life ;  his 
schoolfellows  indulged  him,  the  masters  were 
fond  of  him,  and  he  was  given  special  privileges 
not  known  to  the  others.  His  little  complaints 
were  listened  to  ;  he  had  tea  and  a  hot  roll  o' 
mornings ;  his  ancient  aunt  used  to  toddle 
there  to  bring  him  good  things,  when  he, 
schoolboy-like,  only  despised  her  for  it,  and,  as 
he  confessed  when  older,  used  to  be  ashamed  to 
see  her  come  and  sit  herself  down  on  the  old 
coal-hole  steps  near  where  they  went  into  the 
grammar-school,  and  open  her  apron,  and  bring 
out  her  basin,  with  some  nice  thing  she  had 
caused  to  be  saved  for  him.  And  he  was 
allowed  to  go  home  to  the  Temple  for  short 
visits,  from  time  to  time,  so  passing  his  young 
days  between  "  cloister  and  cloister." 

As  he  walks  down  the  Old  Bailey,  or  through 
Fleet   Market — then    in  the  full   foul  odour  of 


If  n 


iVi^ - 


A    CORNER    IN    IHE    Bl.UE-COAT   SCHOOL. 


Footprints  of  Charles  Lamb.  19 


its  wickedness  and  nastiness — and  so  up  Fleet 
Street  on  his  way  home,  we  may  be  sure  that 
his  eager  eye  alights  on  all  that  is  worth  its 
while,  and  that  the  young  alchemist  is  already 
putting  into  practice  that  process  by  which  he 
transmuted  the  mud  of  street  and  pavemicnt 
into  pure  gold,  and  so  found  all  that  was  always 
precious  to  him  in  their  stones.  After  treading 
them  for  many  years,  as  boy  and  as  man,  he 
asks :  "  Is  any  night-walk  comparable  to  a  walk 
from  St.  Paul's  to  Charing  Cross  for  lighting 
and  paving,  for  crowds  going  and  coming  with- 
out respite,  the  rattle  of  coaches,  and  the  cheer- 
fulness of  shops? " 

Among  his  schoolfellows,  Charles  formed 
special  friendships  with  a  few  select  spirits ; 
and  in  Coleridge — "the  inspired  charity-boy," 
who  entered  the  school  at  the  same  time, 
though  three  years  older — he  found  a  life-long 
companion.  He  looked  up  to  the  elder  lad — 
dreamy,  dejected,  lonely — with  an  affection  and 
a  reverence  which  never  failed  all  through  life, 
though  in  after  years  subject  to  the  strain 
of  Coleridge's  alienation,  absence,  and  silence. 
"  Bless  you,  old  sophist,"  he  wrote  once  to  Cole- 


20  Footprints  of  Charles  Lamb. 


ridge,  "  who,  next  to  human  nature  taught  me 
all  the  corruption  I  was  capable  of  knowing." 

The  two  lads — along  with  Middleton,  then  a 
Grecian  in  the  school,  afterward  Bishop  of  Cal- 
cutta— figure  together  in  the  fine  group  in  sil- 
ver which  passes  from  ward  to  ward  each  year, 
according  to  merit  in  studies  and  in  conduct. 
There  is  a  Charles  Lamb  prize,  too,  given  every 
year,  as  fittingly  should  be,  to  the  best  English 
essayist  among  the  Blue-Coat  boys,  consisting 
of  a  silver  medal :  on  one  side  a  laurel  wreath 
enwrapped  about  the  hospital's  arms ;  on  the 
reverse,  Lamb's  profile,  his  hair  something  too 
curly,  his  aspect  somewhat  smug.  It  would  be 
a  solace  to  his  kindly  spirit  could  he  know  that 
his  memory  is  thus  kept  green  in  the  school 
which  he  left  with  sorrow,  and  to  which  he  al- 
ways looked  back  fondly.  When  a  man,  he 
used  to  go  to  see  the  boys;  and  Leigh  Hunt — 
who  entered  a  little  later — has  left  us  a  pleas- 
ant picture  of  one  of  these  visits.  Charles  had 
been  a  good  student  in  the  musty  classical 
course  of  the  school;  not  fonder  of  his  hexa- 
meters than  of  his  hockey,  however ;  and  when 
he  left,  in  November,  1789,  aged  nearly  fifteen, 


Footprints  of  Charles  Lamb.  21 


he  had  become  a  deputy  Grecian,  he  was  a 
capital  Latin  scholar,  he  probably  had  a  firm 
conviction  that  there  was  a  language  called 
Greek,  and  he  had  read  widely  and  well  in  the 
English  classics.  Doubtless  he  was,  even  then, 
already  familiar  with  the  Elizabethan  drama- 
tists, his  life-long  "  midnight  darlings  ;  "  above 
all,  he  had  nurtured  himself  upon  the  plays  of 
Shakespeare,  which  were  "  the  strongest  and 
sweetest  food  of  his  mind  from  infancy." 

The  somewhat  sombre  surroundings  of  his 
summer  holidays,  too,  helped  to  form  him  into 
an  "  old-fashioned  child."  The  earliest  thing  he 
could  remember,  he  once  wrote,  was  Mackery 
End  ;  or  Mackarel  End,  as  it  is  spelled,  perhaps 
more  properly,  in  some  old  maps  of  Hertford- 
shire. He  could  just  recall  his  visit  there,  un- 
der the  care  of  "Bridget  Elia" — as  he  named 
his  sister  in  his  essays.  This  youthful  visit  had 
been  made  to  a  farmer,  one  Gladman,  who  had 
married  their  grandmother's  sister ;  and  his 
farm-house  was  delightfully  situated  wnthin  a 
gentle  walk  from  Wheathampstead.  Charles 
describes  his  return  thither  with  Mary,  more 
than  forty  years  after ;  and  how,  spite  of  their 


22  Footprints  of  Charles  Lamb. 


trepidation  as  to  the  greeting  they  might  get, 
they  were  joyfully  received  by  a  radiant  woman- 
cousin,  "  who  might  have  sat  to  a  sculptor  for 
the  image  of  Welcome." 

Mainly,  however,  were  the  boy's  holidays 
passed  with  his  grandmother  Field,  the  old 
and  trusted  housekeeper  of  the  Plumer  fam- 
ily at  Blakesware,  in  Hertfordshire:  an  ancient 
mansion,  topped  by  many  turrets,  gables, 
carved  chimneys,  guarded  all  about  by  a 
solid  red-brick  wall  and  heavy  iron  gates. 
He  was  not  allowed  to  go  outside  the 
grounds,  and  was  content  to  wander  over  their 
trimly-kept  terraces  and  about  the  tranquil 
park,  wherein  aged  trees  bent  themselves  in 
grotesque  shapes.  Beyond,  he  fancied  that  a 
dark  lake  stretched  silently,  striking  terror  to 
the  lad's  imagination. 

"  So  strange  a  passion  for  the  place  pos- 
sessed me  in  those  years,  that,  though  there 
lay — I  shame  to  say  how  few  roods  distant  from 
the  mansion — half  hid  by  trees,  what  I  judged 
some  romantic  lake,  such  was  the  spell  which 
bound  me  to  the  house,  and  such  my  careful- 
ness not  to  pass  its  strict  and  proper  precincts, 


Footprints-  of  Charles  Lamb.  23 


that  the  idle  waters  lay  unexplored  for  me ; 
and  not  till  late  in  life,  curiosity  prevailing 
over  elder  devotion,  I  found,  to  my  astonish- 
ment, a  pretty  brawling  brook  had  been  the 
Lacus  Incognitus  of  my  infancy."  It  was  the 
placid  tiny  Ashe,  which,  curving  about  through 
this  valley,  here  brawls  over  one  of  the  wears 
that  have  given  the  place  its  name,  and  his 
lake  proved  to  be  only  one  of  its  little  inlets. 

Within  doors  he  would  wander  through  the 
wainscoted  halls  and  the  tapestried  bedrooms 
— "  tapestry  so  much  better  than  painting,  not 
adorning  merely,  but  peopling  the  wainscots 
.  .  .  all  Ovid  on  the  walls,  in  colours  vivider 
than  his  descriptions.  Actjeon  in  mid  sprout, 
with  the  unappeasable  prudery  of  Diana  ;  and 
the  still  more  provoking,  afid  almost  culinary, 
coolness  of  Dan  Phoebus,  eel-fashion,  deliberately 
divesting  of  Marsyas."  He  would  gaze  long  in 
wonder  on  the  busts  of  the  Twelve  Caesars 
ranged  around  the  marble  hall,  and  would 
study  the  prints  of  Hogarth's  Progress  of  the 
Rake  and  of  the  Harlot  hung  on  the  walls. 
"  Why,  every  plank  and  panel  of  that  house  for 
me  had  magic  in  it,"  he  says  in  the  essay  on 


24  Footprints  of  Charles  Lamb. 


"  Blakesmoor    in    H shire;"    under    which 

name  he  disguises  the  place.  That  is  a  delight- 
ful paper,  ending  with  this  most  musical  pas- 
sage :  "  Mine  too — whose  else  ? — thy  costly  fruit- 
garden,  with  its  sun-baked  southern  wall ;  the 
ampler  pleasure-garden,  rising  backwards  from 
the  house  in  triple  terraces,  with  flower-pots 
now  of  palest  lead,  save  that  a  speck  here  and 
there,  saved  from  the  elements,  bespake  their 
pristine  state  to  have  been  gilt  and  glittering  ; 
the  verdant  quarters  backwarder  still ;  and, 
stretching  still  beyond,  in  old  formality,  thy 
firry  wilderness,  the  haunt  of  the  squirrel,  and 
the  day-long  murmuring  wood-pidgeon,  with 
that  antique  image  in  the  centre,  God  or 
Goddess  I  wist  not ;  but  child  of  Athens  or  old 
Rome  paid  never  a  sincerer  worship  to  Pan  or 
to  Sylvanus  in  their  native  groves,  than  I  to 
that  fragmental  mystery." 

Lamb  went  back  in  1822  to  revisit  these 
boyhood  scenes,  only  to  find  that  ruin  had 
been  done  with  a  swift  hand,  and  that  brick- 
and-mortar  knaves  had  plucked  every  panel 
and  spared  no  plank.  The  ancient  mansion 
entirely   disappeared    during  that    year,   and  a 


Footprints  of  Charles  Lamb.  25 


new  Blakesware  House  soon  after  rose  on  its 
site:  "worthy  in  picturesque  architecture  and 
fair  proportions  of  its  old  namesake,"  in  the 
words  of  Canon  Ainger. 

The  boy  used  to  go  to  church  of  a  Sunday 
with  his  grandmother,  to  Widford ;  nearer  to 
their  place  than  their  own  parish  church  at 
Ware.  On  a  stone  under  the  noble  elms  many 
a  transatlantic  visitor  has  read  the  simple  in- 
scription, "Mary  Field,  August  5th,  1792." 
Beneath  it  lies  the  grandmother. 


II. 


Until  lately,  in  the  year  1889,  when  the 
frenzy  for  Improvement  and  tlie  rage  for  Rent 
wiped  it  out,  I  could  have  sliownyou  a  queer  bit 
of  cobble  wall,  set  in  and  thus  saved  from  ruin  by 
the  new  wall  of  the  Metal  Exchange.  These 
few  square  feet  of  stone  were  the  sole  remaining 
relic  of  the  chapel  of  the  old  manor-house  of 
Leadenhall — so  named  from  its  roofing  of  lead, 
rare  in  those  days — which  house  had  been  pre- 
sented to  the  City  of  London  by  the  munifi- 
cent Richard  Whittington  in  1408,  to  be  used 
as  a  granary  and  market.  It  escaped  the  Great 
Fire,  and  its  chapel  was  not  torn  down  until 
June,  1812.  This  piece  of  its  wall,  having  been 
preserved  then,  was  built  in  with,  and  so  formed 
part  of,  the  old  East  India  House,  That  fa- 
mous structure  stretched  its  stately  and  severe 
facade  along  Leadenhall  Street  just  beyond 
Gracechurch  Street,  and  so  around  the  corner 
into  Lime   Street.      It   was,   withal,   a   gloomy 


A-.- 


.^^1. 


1 J',      \^       "       ^-v  , 


f  '---^^^-  J  ]«(''£ ill'  i'  4 


ii'i" 


W^T^ 


THE    EAST   INDIA    HOUSE. 

[From  an  old  print  in  the  British  Museum.] 


Footprints  of  Charles  Lamb.  27 

pile,  with  its  many-columned  Ionic  portico. 
Its  pediment  contained  a  stone  sovereign  of 
Great  Britain,  holding  an  absurd  umbrella- 
shaped  shield  over  the  sculptured  figures  of 
eastern  commerce  ;  its  front  was  dominated 
by  Britannia  comfortably  seated,  at  her  right 
Europe,  on  a  horse,  and  at  her  left  Asia,  on 
a  camel. 

Within  its  massive  walls — holding  memories 
of  Warren  Hastings  and  of  Cornwallis,  of  Mill, 
gathering  material  for  his  history  of  India,  and 
of  Hoole,  translating  Tasso  in  leisure  hours — 
were  spacious  halls  and  lofty  rooms,  statues  and 
pictures,  a  museum  of  countless  curiosities  from 
the  East.  Beneath  were  vaults  stored  with  a 
goodly  share  of  the  wealth  of  Ormus  and  of  Ind, 
and  dungeons  wherein  were  found — on  the 
downfall  of  John  Company,  in  i860,  and  the 
destruction  of  his  fortress  a  little  later— chains 
and  fetters,  and  a  narrow  passage  leading  to  a 
concealed  postern :  these  last  for  the  benefit 
of  the  victims  of  John's  press-gang,  entrapped, 
drugged,  shipped  secretly  down  the  river,  and 
so  sent  across  water  to  serve  Clive  and  Coote 
as  food  for  powder. 


28  Footprints  of  Charles  Lamb. 


Upstairs,  at  a  desk,  sat  Charles  Lamb,  keeping 
accounts  in  big  books  during  "  thirty-three  years 
of  slavery,"  as  he  phrased  it :  of  unfailing  and 
untiring — albeit  not  untired — devotion  to  his 
duties,  as  his  employers  well  knew.  It  was  in 
April,  1792,  just  as  he  became  seventeen, 
that  he  was  first  chained  to  this  hard  desk; 
and  it  came  about  in  this  way. 

John  Lamb,  the  father,  had  got  nearly  to  his 
dotage  and  quite  to  uselessness,  and  was  pen- 
sioned off  by  his  master  about  this  period.  The 
elder  brother,  dear  little  selfish,  craving  John, 
had  grown  into  a  broad,  burly,  jovial  bachelor, 
wedded  to  his  own  ways ;  living  an  easy  life 
apart  from  them  all ;  "  marching  in  quite  an 
opposite  direction,"  as  his  brother  kindly  puts 
it — speaking,  as  was  his  wont,  not  without  ten- 
derness for  him.  He  contributed  nothing  to 
the  support  of  the  family,  and  Mary  added  but 
little,  beyond  her  own  meagre  maintenance  by 
dress-making  on  a  small  scale — a  trade  she  had 
taught  herself.  In  her  article  on  needlework, 
written  in  18 14,  for  the  British  Ladys  Maga- 
zine, she  says  :  "In  early  life  I  passed  eleven 
years  in  the  exercise  of  my  needle   for  a  liveli- 


Footprints  of  Charles  Lamb.  29 


hood."  And  so  it  seemed  needful  that  the 
boy,  not  yet  fifteen  years  old  on  leaving 
Christ's,  should  get  to  work  to  eke  out  the 
family's  scanty  income. 

John  Lamb  had  a  comfortable  position  in  the 
South  Sea  House.  It  stood  where  now  stands 
the  Oriental  Bank,  at  the  end  of  Threadneedle 
Street,  as  you  turn  up  into  Bishopsgate  Within: 
"its  magnificent  portals  ever  gaping  wide, 
and  disclosing  to  view  a  grave  court,  with 
cloisters  and  pillars."  In  his  essay  entitled 
"The  South  Sea  House,"  Lamb  has  drawn  the 
picture  of  the  place  within :  its  "  stately  por- 
ticos, imposing  staircases,  offices  roomy  as  the 
state  apartments  in  palaces  ;  .  .  ,  the  oaken 
wainscots  hung  with  pictures  of  deceased  gov- 
ernors; .  .  .  huge  charts,  which  subsequent 
discoveries  have  antiquated ;  dusty  maps  of 
Mexico,  dim  as  dreams ;  and  soundings  of  the 
Bay  of  Panama!"  All  "  long  since  dissipated 
or  scattered  into  air  at  the  blast  of  the  breaking 
of  that  famous  BUBBLE." 

Here  Charles  was  given  a  desk,  and  here 
he  worked,  but  at  what  work  and  with  what 
wage  we   do  not  know.     It  was  not   for  many 


30  Footprints  of  Charles  Lamb. 


months,  however,  for  he  soon  received  his 
appointment  in  the  East  India  House  through 
the  kindness  of  Samuel  Salt — the  final  kind- 
ness that  came  to  the  family  from  their 
aged  well-doer;  for  he  died  during  that  year, 
1792.  The  young  accountant  had  but  little 
taste  for,  and  still  less  knowledge  of,  the  mer- 
cantile mysteries  over  which  he  was  set  to 
toil.  He  knew  less  geography  than  a  school- 
boy of  six  weeks'  standing,  he  said  in  mature 
manhood  ;  and  a  map  of  old  Ortelius  was  as  au- 
thentic as  Arrowsmith  to  him.  Of  history  and 
chronology  he  possessed  some  vague  points, 
such  as  he  could  not  help  picking  up  in  the 
course  of  his  miscellaneous  reading ;  but  he 
never  deliberately  sat  down  to  study  any  chron- 
icle of  any  country  !  His  friend  Manning  once, 
with  great  painstaking,  got  him  to  think  that 
he  understood  the  first  proposition  in  Euclid, 
but  gave  him  over  in  despair  at  the  second. 
And,  toil  as  toughly  as  he  might  over  his  ac- 
counts, he  had  to  own,  after  years  of  adding, 
that  "I  think  I  lose  ;^iOO  a  year  at  the  India 
House,  owing  solely  to  my  want  of  neatness  in 
making  up  my  accounts." 


Footprints  of"  Charles  Lamb.  91 


And  yet,  just  the  more  uncongenial  as  was 
his  labour,  by  just  so  much  more  did  it  tend 
in  all  ways  to  his  good.  Wordsworth  said 
truly,  with  admirable  acumen,  that  Lamb's 
submission  to  this  mechanical  employment 
placed  him  in  fine  contrast  with  other  men 
of  genius — his  contemporaries— who,  in  sacri- 
ficing personal  independence,  made  a  wreck 
of  their  morality  and  honour.  No  such  wreck- 
did  Charles  Lamb  make,  and  his  peculiar 
pride  prevented  his  sacrificing  ever  one  iota 
of  his  independence.  He  could  be  no  man's 
debtor  nor  dependant,  and  was  content  to  cut 
his  coat  to  suit  his  cloth,  all  his  life  long.  His 
sole  hatred,  curiously  enough,  was  for  bank- 
rupts ;  and  he  has  portrayed  with  delicious 
irony,  in  his  essay,  "The  Two  Races  of  Men  " — 
the  men  who  borrow  and  the  men  who  lend — 
the  contempt  of  the  former  for  money,  "  ac- 
counting it  (yours  and  mine  especially)  no  better 
than  dross ! " 

The  new  clerk  began  with  an  annual  salary  of 
£^0,  to  be  increased  by  a  small  sum  each  year. 
Many  huge  account-books  were  filled  with  his 
ficfures — who  knows  what  has  become  of  them  ? 


32 


Footprints  of  Charles  Lamb. 


—  and  these  he  used  to  call  his  real  works,  filling 
some  hundred  folios  on  the  shelves  in  Leaden- 
hall  Street.  His  printed  booi<s,  he  claimed, 
were  the  solace  and  the  recreations  of  his 
out-of-office  hours  at  home. 

That  home  was  no 
- -i-?^^3^^^!^f— "^"         ,    longer  in  the  Temple. 
I    The    home   there,  of 
"  snug    firesides,    the 


low-built  roof,  par- 
lours ten  feet  by  ten, 
frugal  board,  and  all 
the  homeliness  of 
h  o  m  e,"  had  been 
given  up,  on  the 
death  of  Mr.  Salt; 
or,  it  may  be,  even 
earlier,  for  I  am  un- 
able to  fix  the  date. 
The  family  had  moved  into  poor  lodgings,  at 
No.  7  Little  Queen  Street,  Holborn,  where 
we  find  them  during  the  year  1795.  The  site 
of  this  house,  and  of  its  adjoining  neighbours 
on  both  sides,  Nos.  6  and  8,  is  now  occupied 
by    Holy    Trinity    Church     of    Lincoln's    Inn 


NO.  7   LITTLE   QUEEN   STREET. 


Footprints  of  Charles  Lamb.  33 


Fields.  The  first  house  of  the  old  row  still 
standing  is  No.  9,  and  the  side  entrance  of 
the  Holborn  Restaurant  is  No.  5  ;  so  that, 
you  see,  the  windows  of  the  Lamb  lodgings 
looked  out  directly  down  Gate  Street,  their 
house  exactly  facing  the  western  embouchure 
of  that  short  and  narrow  street. 

I  pass  in  front  of  the  little  church  a  score  of 
times  in  a  month,  and  each  time  I  look  with 
gladness  at  its  ugly  front,  content  that  it  has 
replaced  the  walls  within  which  was  enacted 
that  terrible  tragedy  of  September,  1796.  The 
family  was  straitened  direfully  in  means,  and  in 
miserable  case  in  many  ways ;  the  mother 
ailing  helplessly,  the  father  decaying  rapidly  in 
mind  and  body ;  the  aged  aunt,  more  of  a  bur- 
den than  a  help,  despite  the  scanty  board  she 
paid ;  and  the  sister,  suffering  almost  cease- 
lessly from  attacks  of  her  congenital  gloom, 
submitting  to  the  constant  toil  of  her  house- 
hold duties,  of  her  dressmaking,  and  of  nurs- 
ing her  parents.  Early  in  1796  Charles  wrote 
to  Coleridge :  "  My  life  has  been  somewhat 
diversified  of  late.  The  six  weeks  that  finished 
last  year  and  began  this,  your  very  humble 
3 


34  Footprints  of  Charles  Lamb. 


servant  spent  very  agreeably  in  a  mad-house 
at  Hoxton.  I  am  got  somewhat  rational  now, 
and  don't  bite  any  one.  But  mad  I  was ! " 
This  was  his  only  attack  ;  there  was  no  more 
such  agreeable  diversity  in  his  life,  and  he  was 
cured  by  the  most  heroic  of  remedies. 

In  the  London  Times  of  Monday,  September 
26,  1796 — in  which  issue  the  editors  "  exult  in 
the  isolation  and  cutting  off"  of  the  various 
armies  of  the  French  Republic  in  Germany, 
and  doubt  the  "  alleged  successes  of  the  army 
in  Italy  reported  to  the  Directory  by  General 
Buonaparte  ;  "  in  which  the  Right  Honourable 
John,  Earl  of  Chatham,  is  named  Lord  Pres- 
ident of  His  Majesty's  Most  Honourable  Privy 
Council ;  and  in  which  "  Mr.  Knowles,  nephew 
and  pupil  of  the  late  Mr.  Sheridan,"  advertises 
that  he  has  "  opened  an  English,  French,  and 
Latin  preparatory  school  for  a  limited  number 
of  young  gentlemen  at  No.  15  Brompton  Cres- 
cent " — in  this  journal  appeared  the  following: 

"  On  Friday  afternoon,  the  coroner  and  a  jury 
sat  on  the  body  of  a  lady  in  the  neighbourhood 
of  Holborn,  who  died  in  consequence  of  a 
wound   from   her  daughter  the  preceding  day. 


Footprints  of  Charles  Lamb.  35 


It  appeared,  by  the  evidence  adduced,  that, 
while  the  family  were  preparing  for  dinner,  the 
young-  lady  seized  a  case-knife  lying  on  the 
table,  and  in  a  menacing  manner  pursued  a 
little  girl,  her  apprentice,  around  the  room.  On 
the  calls  of  her  infirm  mother  to  forbear,  she 
renounced  her  first  object,  and  with  loud  shrieks, 
approached  her  parent.  The  child,  by  her 
cries,  quickly  brought  up  the  landlord  of  the 
house,  but  too  late.  The  dreadful  scene  pre- 
sented to  him  the  mother  lifeless,  pierced  to  the 
heart,  on  a  chair,  her  daughter  yet  wildly  stand- 
ing over  her  with  the  fatal  knife,  and  the  old 
man,  her  father,  weeping  by  her  side,  himself 
bleeding  at  the  forehead  from  the  effects  of  a 
severe  blow  he  had  received  from  one  of  the 
forks  she  had  been  madly  hurling  about  the 
room. 

"  For  a  few  days  prior  to  this,  the  family  had 
observed  some  symptoms  of  insanity  in  her, 
which  had  so  much  increased  on  the  Wednes- 
day evening  that  her  brother,  early  the  next 
morning,  went  to  Dr.  Pitcairn  :  but  that  gentle- 
man was  not  at  home. 

"  It  seems  that  the  young  lady  had  been  once 


^6  Footprints  of  Charles  Lamb. 


before  deranged.  The  jury,  of  course,  brought 
in  their  verdict — Lunacy^ 

The  True  Britori  said :  "It  appears  that  she 
had  been  before  in  the  earher  part  of  her  hfe 
deranged,  from  the  harassing  fatigues  of  too 
much  business.  As  her  carriage  toward  her 
mother  had  always  been  affectionate  in  the  ex- 
treme, it  is  believed  her  increased  attachment 
to  her,  as  her  infirmities  called  for  it  by  day  and 
by  night,  caused  her  loss  of  reason  at  this  time. 
It  has  been  stated  in  some  of  the  morning 
papers  that  she  has  an  insane  brother  in  con- 
finement ;  but  this  is  without  foundation." 

I  ask  you  to  notice  with  what  decent  reti- 
cence, so  far  from  the  ways,  and  so  foolish  in 
the  eyes,  of  our  modern  journalistic  shameless- 
ness,  all  the  names  are  suppressed  in  this  report. 
It  is  certain  that  it  would  not  be  looked  on 
with  favour  in  the  office  of  any  enterprising 
journal,  nowadays!  One  error  the  reporter  did 
make ;  it  was  not  the  landlord,  but  Charles, 
who  came  at  the  child's  cries  ;  luckily  at  hand 
just  in  time  to  disarm  his  sister,  and  thus  pre- 
vent further  harm. 

So    he   was    at    hand    from    that    dav  on,    all 


Footprints  of  Charles  Lamb.  37 


through  his  Hfe,  holding  her  and  helping  her 
in  the  frequent  successive  returns  of  her 
wretched  malady.  His  gentle,  loving,  resolute 
soul  proved  its  fine  and  firm  fibre  under  the 
strain  of  more  than  forty  years  of  undeviating 
devotion  to  which  I  know  no  parallel.  He 
quietly  gave  up  all  other  ties  and  cares  and 
pleasures  for  this  supreme  duty ;  he  never  for 
one  hour  remitted  his  vigil;  he  never  repined 
or  posed,  he  never  even  said  to  himself  that 
he  was  doing  something  fine.  And  such  is 
the  potency  of  this  intangible  tonic  of  unsel- 
fish self-sacrifice,  that  Jiis  tremulous  nerves 
grew  tenser  under  its  action,  and  his  reason 
relaxed  her  rule  thenceforward  never  any 
more.  The  poor  guiltless  murderess  was  sent 
by  the  authorities  to  an  asylum  at  Hoxton. 
There  John  Lamb  and  their  friends  thought 
it  best  to  isolate  her,  safely  and  quietly,  for 
life,  spite  of  her  intervals  of  sanity  ;  but, 
from  the  outset,  Charles  fought  against  this, 
offered  his  life-long  personal  guardianship — this 
boy  of  twenty-two,  with  only  i^ioo  a  year  I 
— and  at  length  succeeded  in  squeezing  con- 
sent    from    the    crown    officials.       He     counts 


38  Footprints  of  Charles  Lamb. 


up,  in  a  letter  to  Coleridge,  the  coin  "  Daddy 
and  I  "  can  spare  for  Mary,  and  computes  all 
the  care  she  will  bring:  "I  know  John  will 
make  speeches  about  it,  but  she  shall  not  go  into 
an  hospital."  So  he  meets  her  as  she  comes 
out,  and  they  walk  away  through  life  hand  in 
hand,  even  as  they  used  to  walk  through  the 
fields  many  a  time  in  later  years  on  the  ap- 
proach of  one  of  her  repeated  relapses  ;  he  lead- 
ing her  back  to  temporary  retirement  in  the 
asylum,  hand  in  hand  together,  both  silently 
crying ! 

The  mother's  body  is  laid  in  the  graveyard  of 
St.  Andrew's,  Holborn,  the  aunt  is  sent  to  other 
relatives,  and  the  father's  wound  having  speed- 
ily healed,  Charles  removed  with  him  to  lodg- 
ings at  No.  45  Chapel  Street,  Pentonville,  on 
the  corner  of  Liverpool  Road.  It  was  a  plain 
little  wooden  house,  as  you  may  see  it  por- 
trayed in  the  cut  copied  from  W.  Carew  Haz- 
litt's  "Charles  and  Mary  Lamb."  Now,  there 
stands  in  its  place  a  blazing  brazen  "pub," 
quite  in  keeping  with  the  squalid  street.  Its 
bar,  like  that  favourite  bar  of  Newman  Noggs, 
"  faces  both   ways,"   in   a   hopeless  attempt    to 


Footprints  of  Charles  Lamb. 


39 


cope  all   around   with   the   unquenchable  thirst 
of  that  quarter  ! 

The  new  home,  however,  brought  but  slight 
brightening  to  the  gloom  and  horror  from 
w  h  i  c  h  Charles 
had  fled  in  the 
old  home.  It 
was  shadowed  by 
the  almost  ac- 
tual presence  of 
the  dead  mother, 
and  made  even 
more  dismal  by 
the  living  ghost 
of  the  aged  fa- 
ther, now  "  in  the 
decay  of  his  facul- 
t  i  e  s,  palsy-smit- 
ten, in  the  last 
sad  stage  of  hu- 
man weakness,  a  remnant  most  forlorn  of  what 
he  was."  He  was  released  by  death  early  in 
1799,  and  laid  by  his  wife's  side  in  the  bury- 
ing-ground  of  St.  Andrew's,  Holborn;  the 
ground  since  then  havine  been  cut  throueh  and 


THE    HOUbE    IN    PENTONVILLE. 


40  Footprints  of  Charles  Lamb. 


wiped  out  by  the  construction  of  the  Holborn 
viaduct. 

Old  Aunt  Hetty,  "  the  kindest,  goodest 
creature,"  had  come  back  to  them,  but  only  to 
die ;  and  their  faithful  servant,  who  had  fol- 
lowed their  fortunes  and  their  misfortunes, 
sickened  slowly  unto  death.  Mary  had  been 
allowed  to  return  home  for  a  while,  from  the 
rooms  at  Hackney,  where'  Charles  had  placed 
her  on  her  release  from  the  asylum,  and  where 
he  passed  his  Sundays  and  holidays  with  her. 
Now,  she  again  broke  down,  and  was  forced 
to  go  back  into  seclusion  at  Hoxton,  Then, 
for  the  one  time  in  all  his  life,  Charles  gave 
way  under  these  successive  strokes,  and  made 
his  only  moan  in  a  letter  to  Coleridge,  early  in 
1800:  "Mary,  in  consequence  of  fatigue  and 
anxiety,  is  fallen  ill  again,  and  I  was  obliged  to 
remove  her  yesterday.  I  am  left  alone  in  a 
house,  with  nothing  but  Hetty's  dead  body  to 
keep  me  company.  To-morrow  I  bury  her,  and 
then  I  shall  be  quite  alone,  with  nothing  but 
a  cat  to  remind  me  that  the  house  has  been 
full  of  living  beings  like  myself.  My  heart  is 
quite  sunk,  and  I  don't  know  where  to  look  for 


Footprints  of  Charles  Lamb.  41 


relief.  Mary  will  get  better  again,  but  her  con- 
stantly being  liable  to  these  attacks  is  dreadful; 
nor  is  it  the  least  of  our  evils  that  her  case  and 
all  our  story  is  so  well  known  around  us.  We 
are  in  a  manner  marked.  ...  I  am  eoine 
to  try  and  get  a  friend  to  come  and  be  with  me 
to-morrow — I  am  completely  shipwrecked." 

No,  he  was  not  completely  wrecked,  but  ter- 
ribly tempest-tossed  for  a  time  ;  and  so  at  last 
— in  the  high  phrase  of  Coleridge — "  called  by 
•sorrow  and  anguish  and  a  strange  desolation  of 
hopes  into  quietness." 

But  "  marked  "  cruelly  was  the  little  family 
in  very  truth.  Soon  they  were  forced  to  make 
one  more  of  their  many  repeated  removes. 
Other  quarters  were  offered  them  just  then  in 
the  house  of  one  John  Mathew  Gutch,  who  had 
been  a  schoolmate  at  Christ's  of  Lamb's,  and 
was  at  that  time  a  law  stationer  in  South- 
ampton Buildings,  Holborn.  It  was  a  most 
friendly  and  even  generous  offer,  for  Gutch 
knew  the  whole  sad  story,  and  the  dangers,  in 
all  probabiHty,  portending.  His  house  has  been 
torn  down  only  lately,  along  with  the  one  hard 
by  in  which  lived  Hazlitt,  twenty  years  later. 


42  Footprints  of  Charles  Lamb. 


It  would  be  but  the  dreariest  of  records  of 
the  young  clerk's  three  years  at  Pentonville, 
and  of  his  earlier  life  in  Little  Queen  Street,  if 
one  could  point  to  nothing  brighter  than  his 
anxiety,  poverty,  loneliness ;  his  dull  days  at 
his  desk,  his  duller  evenings  at  cribbage  with 
his  almost  imbecile  father.  "  I  go  home  at 
night  over-wearied,  quite  faint,  and  then  to 
cards  with  my  father,  who  will  not  let  me 
enjoy  a  meal  in  peace."  For  he  says — and  to 
the  son  this  is  unanswerable! — "If  you  won't 
play  with  me,  you  might  as  well  not  come 
home  at  all."  He  is  not  allowed  to  write  a 
letter,  he  can  go  nowhere,  he  has  no  acquaint- 
ance. "  No  one  seeks  or  cares  for  my  society, 
and  I  am  left  alone."  The  only  literary  man 
he  knew  was  George  Dyer ;  who  was  "  good- 
ness itself,"  indeed,  but  not  a  stimulating  com- 
panion. Sometimes  he  succeeded  in  slipping 
out  to  the  theatre,  of  which  he  was  as  fond 
as,  when  a  boy,  he  felt  the  delights  he  has 
delineated  in  "My  First  Play."  These  came 
back  with  added  keenness  to  him  now,  after  a 
long  interval;  for  the  scholars  at  Christ's  had 
not  been  allowed  to  enter  any  play-house. 


Footprints  of  Charles  Lamb.  43 


And  there  was  solace  for  all  his  privations 
to  be  found  in  his  beloved  books,  and  he 
"  browsed  "  in  many  a  field.  "  I  have  no  re- 
pugnances. Shaftesbury  is  not  too  genteel  for 
me,  nor  Jonathan  Wild  too  low.  I  can  read 
anything  which  I  call  a  book.  There  are  things 
in  that  shape  which  I  cannot  allow  for  such." 
He  had  a  spiritual  kinship  with  the  Eliza- 
bethans, and  was  worthy,  in  his  own  words,  of 
listening  to  Shakespeare  read  aloud  one  of  his 
scenes  hot  from  his  brain.  Yet  he  was  fond  of 
the  writers  of  the  last  century,  and  wished  that 
he  might  be  able  to  forget  Fielding  and  Swift 
and  the  rest  for  the  sake  of  reading  them  anew. 
For  modern  literature,  save  for  a  few  favourite 
poems  and  for  the  works  of  his  personal  friends, 
he  cared  but  little.  For  modern  affairs  he 
cared  nothing,  and  knew  nearly  nothing  about 
them.  There  is  hardly  a  hint  in  his  letters  of 
the  grim  Napoleonic  drama  which  was  enacted 
during  the  younger  years  of  the  century ;  he 
only  grieved  that  War  and  Nature  and  Mr.  Pitt 
should  have  conspired  to  increase  the  cost  of 
coals  and  bread  and  beer !  He  once  heard  a 
butcher    in    the    market-place    of    Enfield    say 


44  Footprints  of  Charles  Lamb. 


something  about  a  change  of  ministry ;  and  it 
struck  him  that  he  neither  knew  nor  cared  who 
was  in  and  who  was  out.  Indeed,  he  could 
not  make  these  present  times  present  to  him- 
self, and  lived  in  the  past,  so  that  the  so- 
called  realities  of  life  seemed  its  mockeries 
to  him.  "  Hang  the  age!.  I  will  write  for  an- 
tiquity," he  told  the  able  editor  who  criticised 
his  style  as  not  in  keeping  with  the  taste  of  the 
age.  In  truth,  he  was  a  walking  anachronism, 
and  beneath  his  nineteenth-century  waistcoat 
pulsated  a  heart  of  the  seventeenth  century — 
that  of  Sir  Thomas  Browne,  perchance. 

Lamb's  first  appearance  in  print  was  made 
anonymously  during  these  dreary  days,  in  the 
Morning  CJironiclc,  and  consisted  of  a  sonnet 
to  Mrs.  Siddons,  whom  he  had  seen  for  the 
first  time,  and  who  had  profoundly  impressed 
him.  This  sonnet  and  three  others  formed  his 
share  of  a  small  volume  of  ''  Poems  on  Various 
Subjects,"  mainly  by  Coleridge,  issued  under 
the  latter's  name  in  the  spring  of  1796.  His 
preface  says :  "  The  effusions  signed  C.  L.  were 
written  by  Mr.  Charles  Lamb  of  the  India 
House.     Independently  of   the  signature,  their 


Footprints  of  Charles  Lamb.  4=^ 


superior  merit  would  have  sufficiently  distin- 
guished them."  In  the  summer  of  1797  ap- 
peared a  second  edition,  "  to  which  are  now 
added  poems  by  Charles  Lamb  and  Charles 
Lloyd  " — the  former  contributing  about  fifteen 
short  poems.  This  Lloyd  was  the  son  of  a  Bir- 
mingham banker,  a  morbid  young  man  addicted 
to  rhyme  and  to  melancholy — a  recent  acquaint- 
ance of  Lamb's,  and  one  who  could  not  have 
been  a  cheerful  comrade  for  him,  just  then. 

In  1798  appeared  "  A  Tale  of  Rosamund  Gray 
and  Old  Blind  Margaret,"  as  its  original  title 
ran.  It  is  the  best  known  of  his  works  after 
his  essays,  and  we  all  echo  Shelley's  words  to 
Leigh  Hunt :  "  What  a  lovely  thing  is  '  Rosa- 
mund Gray'!  How  much  knowledge  of  the 
sweetest  and  deepest  part  of  our  nature  in  it!" 
And  yet  this  "  miniature  romance,"  as  Talfourd 
well  named  it,  surely  seems  somewhat  unreal 
and  artificial,  for  all  its  charm  ! 

Lamb  found  constant  comfort,  too,  during 
these  dark  years,  in  his  only  two  intimate 
friends :  Coleridge,  with  whom  he  had  renewed 
his  companionship,  broken  by  Coleridge's  visit  to 
Germany,  and  by  his  six  months'  service  in  the 


46  Footprints  of  Charles  Lamb. 


Light  Dragoons ;  and  Southey,  whose  healthy 
and  wholesome  common-sense  was  just  then  a 
timely  tonic  for  Lamb.  These  three  youthful 
dreamers  used  to  sit  and  smoke  and  speculate  of 
nights  in  a  little  den  at  the  back  of  the  Salu- 
tation and  Cat — a  tavern  at  No.  17  Newgate 
Street,  nearly  opposite  the  old  School.  Two  of 
them  may  haply  have  learned  their  way  there 
while  still  scholars  !  "  I  image  to  myself  that 
little  smok}'  room  at  the  Saliitatiott  and  Cat, 
where  we  have  sat  together  through  the  winter 
nights,  beguiling  the  cares  of  life  with  poesy," 
Lamb  wrote,  later ;  and  he  refers  more  than 
once  to  "  that  nice  little  smoky  room  at  the 
Salutation,  which  is  even  now  continually  pre- 
senting itself  to  my  recollection,  with  all  its 
associated  train  of  pipes,  tobacco,  egg-hot, 
welsh-rabbit,  metaphysics,  and  poetry."  They 
say  that  the  wary  landlord,  to  whom  Coleridge's 
rhapsodies  were  quite  unintelligible,  yet  who 
fully  understood  their  value  in  drawing  a  knot 
of  thirsty  listeners,  offered  the  Talker  free 
quarters  for  life,  if  he  would  stay  and  talk  ! 

The  men  who  sit  and  smoke  and  soak  in  tap- 
rooms, and    who   never    know  when    they  are 


Footpdnrts        '  '  47 

f-"    ■'   1-;      :nse,  are  jjjlf:    ;'  .        -■   - 

c_-     :.:: :::eiit    IB    sac:.     .-.    " 

Carlyle's  cor^cise  dictum  tker--.    .    .        .   . 
faller.   '  tlieir  peadsiiloiiis  eajs :        T  .  i . :  55 

a  passive  \    ;      :    and  be  '  -  "  '  .  -      - 

1^0  --  '  -  -'-^  -'^ 

Xlie  old  tavern — so  old,  tiiiat  witliiw?  at?  TraHl.? 
Sir  Oiristopiier  Wren  used  to  sit 
pipe,  comiiig  in  tired  from  tlae  reb  uiiiiuiini^  'O-i  Sil 
P'v!'-     "v--   ' -' vnd  the  comer — !^' "  --      -    -;:- 
'"-.'.  ^    -.    -.    -.   .  : :.:   smoky  room  is  -    :    . 

Cat   has    vanished,   and   the    ._.:.  iTeets 

us    as  a  slap-bang  Citi,"    eating-houst  i.r. 

Before   t ':  ;  :  -  jction  of  the  origi-Ra",    jr.it.  an 

a  vear.  v. .  _  .  _   ,   .  r  'great  :_:'.;:.:"    . : 

the   Blue-Coats,    anc         ■    ..    -  "gS^  icit:     :      : 
once  "  murmiarous  haxiiii      :    *        "     '"       _   — s 


his  voice  husky  ;  then  he  went  away.  ne". 

reappear.     Doubtles;  ':.-. 

thror.'      '  '    :'  :—       _     :  .r..- 


48  Footprints  of  Charles  Lamb. 


Deum  !  Anglice — Welsh  rabbit,  punch,  and 
poesy,"  in  Lamb's  words. 

Another  favourite  resort  of  the  three  cronies 
was  TJic  Feathers,  a  dirty,  dingy,  delightful 
tavern,  as  I  have  seen  it,  in  Hand  Court,  Hol- 
born,  nearly  opposite  the  Great  Turnstile  lead- 
ing into  Lincoln's  Inn  Fields.  It  was  only 
two  minutes'  walk  from  the  lodgings  in  Little 
Queen  Street,  and  but  a  few  houses  distant 
from  the  oil-shop  of  Charles's  godfather,  at  the 
corner  of  Featherstone  Buildings  and  Holborn. 
The  Feathers  has  gone  to  its  own  place,  a  modern 
something  maddens  me  on  its  site,  and  all  that 
I  have  been  able  to  rescue  is  the  quaint  sign 
which  hung  until  lately  above  the  entrance  of 
the  court  in  Holborn,  and  looked  down  on  the 
frequent  goings  in  and  out  of  our  friends. 

It  was  while  living  in  Pentonville  that  Lamb 
passed  through  his  second,  and  his  final,  love- 
sickness.  His  first  attack  had  been  caused  by 
undue  exposure,  when  a  guileless  youth,  unpro- 
tected by  proper  prophylactics,  to  the  provoca- 
tive charms  of  the  "  Alice  Winterton  "  of  his 
later  writings.  It  is  believed  that  her  real  name 
was  Ann  Simmons,  and  that  he  used  to  meet 


■■■'    «V)B~'^'V*<?«^  ^^-^ 


ipcpr  - 


THE    FEATHERS    TAVERN. 


Footprints  of  Charles  Lamb.  49 


her  during  his  holidays  at  his  grandmother's 
place.  For,  with  all  his  delightful  egoistic 
frankness  in  prattling  about  himself,  tliis  was 
the  one  point  too  tender  to  be  touched  on, 
seriously  or  jocularly,  ever  to  any  one.  It  is 
of  her,  surely,  that  he  is  thinking  in  two  of  his 
four  sonnets  in  the  Coleridge  collection,  where- 
in he  speaks  of  his  "  fancied  wanderings  with 
a  fair-haired  maid."  He  placed  the  scene  of 
'*  Rosamund  Gray  "  in  the  cottage  where  lived 
Ann  Simmons,  near  Widford,  not  far  from 
Blakesware ;  and  they  show  to  sentimental 
strangers  that  portion  of  the  cluster  of  cot- 
tages still  left.  They  claim  that  it  is  her  por- 
trait which  he  drew  for  that  of  his  heroine, 
even  as  he  is  the  Allan  Clare  of  the  little 
story.  He  certainly  hints,  just  for  once,  at 
this  love  scrape  in  that  letter  to  Coleridge  in 
which  he  speaks  of  his  six  weeks'  stay  in  the 
Hoxton  Asylum:  "It  may  convince  you  of 
my  regard  for  you  when  I  tell  you  that  my 
head  ran  on  you  in  my  madness,  as  much 
almost  as  on  another  person,  who  I  am  inclined 
to  think  was  the  more  immediate  cause  of  my 
temporary     frenzy."     But     his     recovery    from 


50  Footprints  of  Charles  Lamb. 


both  derangements  was  radical  and  permanent, 
and  he  was  able  to  say,  only  a  little  later:  "  I 
am  pleased  and  satisfied  with  myself  that  this 
weakness  troubles  me  no  longer.  I  am  wedded, 
Coleridge,  to  the  fortunes  of  my  sister  and  my 
poor  old  father."  That  wedding  to  the  for- 
tunes of  his  sister  was  his  life-long  union,  and 
haply  saved  him  from  any  other,  which  would 
have  harmed,  rather  than  have  helped,  this 
man  ;  and  would  have  sacrificed  deplorably  this 
vivid  personality  on  the  altar  of  the  greatly- 
glorified  god,  the  infestive  Humdrum. 

His  serene  good  sense  asserted  its  strength, 
at  no  time  and  in  no  way,  so  signally  as  in  his 
absolute  emancipation  from  this  transient  en- 
slavement ;  and  in  his  sedate  statement  of  the 
fact — true  in  so  many  cases  where  the  victim  is 
too  stupid  to  know  it  or  too  timorous  to  own  it 
— that,  "  if  it  drew  me  out  of  some  vices,  it  also 
prevented  the  growth  of  many  virtues." 

As  is  usual,  however,  with  the  amatory  in- 
firmity, he  suffered  from  that  slight  and  super- 
ficial relapse,  later  in  life,  to  which  I  have 
already  referred.  In  his  daily  goings  to  and 
fro    in    Islington,    he   used  to  meet  the  lovely 


Footprints  of  Charles  Lamb.  51 


Quakeress,  to  whom  he  never  spoke,  and  whom 
he  adored  silently  and  from  afar.  He  only  knew 
that  she  was  named  Hester,  and  it  is  her  name 
which  he  has  made  immortal  and  her  sweet 
memory  which  he  has  embalmed  imperishably 
in  his  exquisite  verses: 

"When  maidens  such  as   Hester  die." 

And  his  first,  his  serious,  affair  may  have  justi- 
fied its  existence  by  recalling  to  us  his  well- 
known  wish  that  no  incident,  no  untoward  acci- 
dent even,  of  his  life  might  have  been  reversed. 
So  it  is,  that  in  his  "  New  Year's  Eve  "  he  avers 
that  "  it  is  better  that  I  should  have  pined 
away  seven  of  my  goldenest  years,  when  I  was 
thrall  to  the  fair  hair  and  fairer  eyes  of  Alice 
W n,  than  that  so  passionate  a  love-adven- 
ture should  be  lost." 


III. 


"  I  AM  going  to  change  my  lodgings,  having 
received  a  hint  that  it  would  be  agreeable,  at 
Our  Lady's  next  feast.  I  have  partly  fixed  upon 
most  delectable  rooms,  which  look  out  (when 
you  stand  a-tiptoe)  over  the  Thames  and  Surrey 
Hills,  at  the  upper  end  of  King's  Bench  Walk, 
in  the  Temple.  There  I  shall  have  all  the  pri- 
vacy of  a  house  without  the  encumbrance,  and 
shall  be  able  to  lock  my  friends  out,  as  often  as 
I  desire  to  hold  free  converse  with  any  immor- 
tal mind — for  my  present  lodgings  resemble  a 
minister's  levee,  I  have  so  increased  my  ac- 
quaintance (as  the}'  call  'em)  since  I  have  resided 
in  town."  In  this  letter,  written  to  Manning 
early  in  i8oi,  three  significant  points  call  for 
comment.  The  phrase  "  in  town,"  referring  to 
his  residence  in  Southampton  Buildings,  shows 
how  his  previous  abode  in  Islington  was  then 
in  the  country,  and  how  the  squalid  houses  of 
the    foul    Chapel    Street    of    to-day    have    sup- 


Footprints  of  Charles  Lamb.  53 


planted  those  pleasant  cottages  set  in  gardens, 
with  rural  lanes  cutting  the  fields  between. 
His  curt  reference  to  their  "having  received  a 
hint  "  to  move,  proves  how  pitifully  they  were 
"marked,"  as  he  had  already  put  it,  and  how 
soon  even  the  kindly  Gutch  withdrew  his  offer 
of  shelter.  The  few  words,  "  I  have  so  in- 
creased my  acquaintance  "  give  a  wide  sugges- 
tion of  the  already  growing  attraction  of  this 
odd,  original  young  character  to  all  bright 
minds  and  sweet  natures  with  whom  he  came 
in  contact. 

And  so,  on  Lady  Day,  March  25,  1801,  he  and 
Mary  moved  into  the  Temple,  there  to  begin, 
near  their  childhood  home,  that  life  of  "  dual 
loneliness,"  never  again  broken  in  upon :  con- 
soled by  their  mutual  affection,  cheered  by  their 
common  tastes,  brightened  by  the  companion- 
ship of  congenial  beings.  In  the  Temple  they 
remained  for  seventeen  years,  living  in  two  sets 
of  chambers  during  that  period.  After  eight 
years'  abode  at  No.  16  Mitre  Court  Buildings, 
they  were  compelled  to  quit,  their  landlord 
wanting  the  rooms  for  himself.  Towards  the 
end  of  March,  1809,  in  a  letter  to  Manning,  then 


S4  Foolpi  nits  iM'rh.iiK's  1  ,imb 


in  China.  Lanib  wioto  .u;  If  lu>  woic  in  [\\c  wcxi 
street:  "  W'hilo  I  [\\\\\k  oi  ii.Kt  mc  Ull  )  ou 
wo  .ux^  moved.  Pont  vonu-  .ui\  more  to  Mitre 
Court  IniiKlin;;-;.  \\\-  .lu-  .it  ;}  .^-^out  li..nipton 
Buildil\gs.  (."h.uK'vMN-  1  ,im\  .itul  sh.dl  1h-  Iumo 
till  .ibovit  tlu-  (.Mul  ot  M.i\,  w  luMi  wo  tonio\\-  to 
No.  4  Inner  1  enipio  Lane,  wheio  1  nuan  lo 
li\  e  .nul  die." 

Their  home  iti  ."^ont  h.nnpt  on  iMiiKlini;^  ilur- 
ing"  these  few  nu-'iuhs  while  eh. in^inL;  ehamln-rs 
still  stvTuds  iiuaet  :  a  «.leUi;ht(ul  old  sqn.ire.  solid. 
briek  house,  just  in  l"rot\t  of  the  tiny  i^.uden  ot" 
Staple  Inn.  Init  both  hU-'eks  o(  IniildinL^s  in 
w  lueh  he  li\ed  durinv^  Uu^se  seventeen  ye, us 
in  the  Femple  h.ue  been  torn  dow  ti  .md  re- 
plaeed  b\"  modern  sirueiuies. 

Although  he  disliked  leaxing  the  old  eh.im- 
bei"s.  he  found  the  new  set.  vmi  the  third  .md 
fourth  lloors  of  No.  4  Inner  Temple  1  ane. 
*•  far  more  eommotlious  and  retonu\  .  .  .  Uhe 
rooms  are  delicious,  and  the  best  look  back 
into  Hare  Court,  where  there  is  a  pump  .\lw  .lys 
gfoii\g.  lust  now  it  is  «.lry.  Hare  Court  trees 
come  in  at  the  w  indow .  so  th.u  it  is  like  living 
in  a  carden  I  "      This  w  ,is  w  titten  to  Coleridge. 


Footprints  of  Charles  Lamb.  55 


in  June,  1809;  and  to  Manning,  in  letters  dur- 
ing this  period.  Lamb  spoke  of  the  churchyard- 
like court  having  "  three  trees  and  a  pump  in 
it.  Do  you  know  it  ?  I  was  born  near  it, 
and  used  to  drink  at  that  pump  when  I  was  a 
Rechabite  of  six  years  old  .  .  .  the  water 
of  which  is  excellent  cold,  with  brandy,  and  not 
very  insipid  without.  Here  I  hope  to  set  up 
my  rest  and  not  cjuit  till  Mr.  Powell,  the  un- 
dertaker, gives  me  notice  that  I  may  have  pos- 
session of  my  last  lodging.  He  lets  lodgings 
for  single  gentlemen.  ...  I  should  be 
happy  to  see  you  any  evening.  Bring  any  of 
your  friends,  the  Mandarins,  with  you." 

He  did,  indeed,  as  he  often  complained,  hate 
and  dread  unaccustomed  places,  but  he  was 
well  content  to  discover  that  this  new  habita- 
tion had  "  more  aptitudes  for  growing  old  than 
you  shall  often  see." 

It  was  here  that  Mary  made  the  memorable 
find  of  an  empty  adjoining  garret  of  four  un- 
tenanted, unowned  rooms;  of  which  they  took 
possession  by  degrees,  and  to  which  Charles 
could  escape  from  his  too  frequent  friends,  who 
had   more   leisure  than   himself.     Here  he   did 


56  Footprints  of  Charles  Lamb. 


his  literary  work  in  secrecy  and  silence,  "  as 
much  alone  as  if  he  were  in  a  lodging  in  the 
midst  of  Salisbury  Plain."  They  never  knew  to 
whom  these  chambers  rightly  belonged,  and  they 
were  never  dispossessed.  So  all  was  well  with 
him,  and  even  in  his  whimsical  perversity  he  was 
able  to  complain  only  that  there  was  another 
"  Mr.  Lamb  "  not  far  from  him  ;  "  his  duns  and 
his  girls  frequently  stumble  up  to  me,  and  I  am 
obliged  to  satisfy  both  in  the  best  way  I  am  able." 

The  staircase  of  the  new  building  is  still 
stumbled  up  by  duns  and  girls,  you  may  drink 
from  that  same  pump  to-day,  you  may  see  those 
trees  still  in  that  court,  but  Jiis  windows  no 
longer  look  out  on  trees  and  pump  and  court. 

Talfourd  and  Procter  have  left  vivid  pictures 
of  the  memorable  Wednesday  evenings  in  the 
Temple,  the  former  contrasting  them  with  the 
stately  assemblages  of  Holland  House.  "  Like 
other  great  men,  I  have  a  public  day,"  Lamb 
wrote.  He  loved  men,  and  he  had  a  rare  ca- 
pacity for  getting  at  the  best  they  had  in  them, 
a  real  reverence  for  their  abilities,  a  kindly  sym- 
pathy with  their  diverse  tastes,  and  a  most 
friendly  frankness  as  to  all  their  foibles.    "  How 


Footprints  of  Charles  Lamb.  57 


could  I  hate  him?"  he  asked  of  some  one: 
"  Don't  I  know  him  ?  I  never  could  hate  any 
one  I  knew."  He  looked  so  constantly  and  so 
closely  into  the  strange  faces  of  calamity,  that 
he  yearned  always  for  the  nearness  of  friendly 
features.  Above  all,  he  understood,  as  Goethe 
did,  "  how  mighty  is  the  goddess  of  propin- 
quity ;  "  and  although  he  was  so  untiring  and 
prolific  and  delightful  in  his  letters  to  absent 
friends,  he  insisted  that  "  one  glimpse  of  the 
human  face  and  one  shake  of  the  human  hand 
is  better  than  whole  reams  of  this  thin,  cold 
correspondence;  yea,  of  more  worth  than  all 
the  letters  that  have  sweated  the  fingers  of  sen- 
sibility from  Madame  Sevigne  and  Balzac  to 
Sterne  and  Shenstone." 

So  it  came  to  pass  that  his  little  rooms  in  the 
Temple  held  a  motley  crowd.  Low-browed 
rooms  they  were,  set  about  with  worn,  homely, 
home-like  furniture  ;  his  favourite  books — his 
sole  extravagance — in  their  shelves  all  about. 
His  ragged  veterans,  he  called  them;  "the  fin- 
est collection  of  shabby  books  I  ever  saw;  such 
a  number  of  first-rate  works  in  very  bad  con- 
dition is,   I    think,    nowhere   to    be    found,"    is 


58  Footprints  of  Charles  Lamb, 


Crabb  Robinson's  caustic  comment  on  them. 
In  narrow  black  frames,  on  the  walls  of  his  best 
room,  hung  "  a  choice  collection  of  the  works 
of  Hogarth,  an  English  painter  of  some  hu- 
mour." The  sideboard  was  already  spread  by 
Mary  with  cold  beef,  porter,  punch ;  tobacco 
and  pipes  were  at  hand,  and  tables  made  ready 
for  whist.  This  is  Charles's  invitation  :  "  Swipes 
exactly  at  nine,  punch  to  commence  at  ten, 
witJi  argninc7it ;  difference  of  opinion  expected 
to  take  place  about  eleven ;  perfect  unanim- 
ity with  some  haziness  and  dimness  before 
twelve!"  He  used  to  play  right  through  his 
programme.  His  old  cronies  came,  "  friendly 
harpies,"  he  named  many  of  them  :  for,  as  he 
said  of  the  pretended  dead  Elia,  his  intimados 
were,  to  confess  a  truth,  in  the  world's  eye,  a 
ragged  regiment.  He  never  forsook  a  friend, 
ragged  or  rich  in  raiment  or  in  repute,  and  "  the 
burrs  stuck  to  him ;  but  they  were  good  and 
loving  burrs  for  all  that."  It  was  the  simple 
statement  of  a  truth  which  he  had  made,  long 
before  this :  ''  I  cannot  scatter  friendships  like 
chuck-farthings,  nor  let  them  drop  from  mine 
hand,  like  hour-glass  sand." 


Footprints  of  Charles  Lamb.  59 


New  acquaintances  came,  too  ;  never  men  of 
fame  or  fortune  or  fashion,  but  men  of  mark, 
you  may  be  sure.  And  many  among  them 
notable  only  for  some  tincture  of  the  absurd 
in  their  characters :  for  "  I  love  a  Fool,''  he 
said,  "  as  naturally  as  if  I  were  of  kith  and 
kin  to  him."  Crabb  Robinson  has  left  us  his 
reminiscence  of  this  place  and  these  people, 
when  speaking  of  his  first  acquaintance  with 
the  Lambs :  "  They  were  then  living  in  a  gar- 
ret in  Inner  Temple  Lane.  In  that  humble 
apartment  I  spent  many  happy  hours,  and 
saw  a  greater  number  of  excellent  persons 
than  I  had  ever  seen  collected  together  in  one 
room."  Thus  has  he  summed  up,  in  his  sedate 
way,  all  that  need  be  said  on  that  score. 

The  capricious  Coleridge  had  once  more  be- 
come constant,  after  his  refusal  for  two  years  to 
write,  and  his  needless  estrangement,  which  had 
called  forth  Lamb's  lines,  *'  I  had  a  friend,  a 
kinder  friend  had  no  man ;  "  and  of  whom,  after 
many  years,  he  yet  was  able  to  say :  "  The 
more  I  see  of  him  in  the  quotidian  undress  and 
relaxation  of  his  mind,  the  more  cause  I  see  to 
love  him  and  believe  him  a  very  good   man." 


6o  Footprints  of  Charles  Lamb. 


There  was  Hazhtt — trying  to  paint  when  Lamb 
first  met  him,  finding  later  his  true  calling  as 
art  critic  and  essayist  ;  easily  first  of  all  in  that 
field,  before  or  after  him,  in  insight,  breadth, 
and  vigour  ;  arrogant,  intense,  bitter,  brooding 
forever  over  the  fall  of  Napoleon :  the  only 
male  creature  he  reverenced  except  Coleridge. 
He  must  needs  respect,  in  Coleridge,  the  one 
man  known  to  him  who  alone  could  surpass 
him  in  untiring  fluency,  even  under  the  in- 
fluence of  strongest  tea — sole  stimulus  allowed 
himself  by  Hazlitt  at  that  time.  Him,  Lamb 
finds  to  be,  "  in  his  natural  state,  one  of  the 
wisest  and  finest  spirits  breathing."  And  he, 
too,  had  tried  to  quarrel  with  the  Lambs,  and 
had  failed,  as  did  all  who  made  the  sorry  at- 
tempt !  There  was  William  Wordsworth,  as- 
cetic, self-centred,  quite  sure  of  himself ;  whose 
true  powers,  and  all  that  was  genuine  in  his 
genius.  Lamb  Avas  one  of  the  first  to  recognize 
and  to  celebrate.  There  was  Godwin,  so  bold 
in  his  speculations,  so  daring  with  his  pen,  so 
placid  in  person,  and  so  mild  of  voice.  This 
terrif}'ing  radical  used  to  prattle  on  trivial 
topics   till    after    supper,    and    then    invariably 


Footprints  of  Charles  Lamb.  6i 


fall  fast  asleep.  "  A  very  well-behaved  decent 
man,  .  .  .  quite  a  tame  creature,  I  assure 
you  ;  a  middle-sized  man,  both  in  stature 
and  understanding,"  wrote  his  keen-eyed  host. 
There  was  old  Captain  Burney,  afterward 
admiral,  son  of  the  famous  organist,  bro- 
ther of  the  more  famous  writing-woman, 
Fanny,  Madame  d'Arblay.  He  had  been 
taught  by  Eugene  Aram,  he  had  sailed  all 
around  the  globe  with  Captain  Cook,  and 
was  still  young  and  tender  in  heart  under  his 
rough  exterior.  There  was  his  son,  Martin,  of 
whom  Lamb  said,  "  I  have  not  found  a  whiter 
soul  than  thine  ;  "  Leigh  Hunt,  airy,  sprightly, 
full  of  fine  fancies  ;  Charles  Lloyd,  poetic  and 
intense  ;  Tom  Hood,  slight  of  figure,  feeble  of 
voice,  face  of  a  Methodist  parson,  silent  save 
for  his  sudden  puns;  Thomas  Manning,  the 
Cambridge  mathematical  tutor,  "  a  man  of  a 
thousand  ;  "  Basil  Montagu,  the  philanthropized 
courtier ;  stalwart  Allan  Cunningham ;  Hay- 
don,  the  painter,  eager  everywhere  for  contro- 
versy ;  the  preacher,  Edward  Irving,  content 
to  listen,  there ;  Bernard  Barton,  Quaker  poet, 
bank  drudge ;   gentle    and    genial    Barry  Corn- 


62  Footprints  of  Charles  Lamb. 


wall ;  Talfourd,  the  sympathetic  chronicler  of 
these  scenes ;  constant  and  trusty  Crabb  Rob- 
inson ;  De  Quincey,  self-involved  and  some- 
times spiteful,  yet  not  behind  any  one  of  that 
brilliant  band  in  his  love  for  Lamb,  whom  he 
earnestly  attests  to  be  "  the  noblest  of  human 
beings." 

There  appeared  sometimes  at  these  gather- 
ings a  most  curious  character,  hardly  known 
now  as  one  of  this  group,  but  remembered 
rather  from  the  parts  he  plays  in  the  pages  of 
Bulwer  and  of  Dickens.  This  was  Thomas 
Wainewright,  the  "Janus  Weathercock  "  of  the 
London  Magazine ;  a  flimsy,  plausible,  conceited 
scoundrel,  in  v/hom  Lamb  good-naturedly  found 
something  to  like.  It  was  after  our  friend's 
death  that  Wainewright's  thefts  and  poisonings 
brought  him  to  trial,  and  sent  him  to  Van 
Diemen's  land,  where  the  dandy  convict  died  in 
madness,  raving  and  unrepentant. 

And  Charles  Lamb,  the  central  and  dom- 
inating personality  of  all  these  strong  charac- 
ters, towers  above  them  all,  not  only  and  not 
so  much  by  the  greatness  of  his  gifts  as  by 
that  of  his  character.     For  simplicity,  sincerity, 


Footprints  of  Charles  Lamb.  6} 


singleness  of  soul — all  that  is  childlike  in  genius 
— all  those  qualities  which  go  to  make  up 
greatness  of  character — these  were  his.  He 
was  always  young.  To  that  scoffer  who,  sneer- 
ing at  Lamb's  habits,  said  that  no  man  ought 
to  be  a  Bohemian  after  the  age  of  thirty,  as  to 
all  the  scoffers  since,  there  is  only  the  one  old 
answer — Lamb  never  got  to  be  thirty. 

"  Of  all  men  of  genius  I  ever  knew,"  said 
Crabb  Robinson — and  he  knew  all  that  were 
going  in  his  day  !  —  "  Charles  Lamb  was  the  one 
most  intensely  and  universally  to  be  loved." 
Among  them  all,  he  alone  was  known  by  his 
first  name  ;  just  as,  at  school,  he  had  been,  as 
he  always  best  liked  to  be,  "  Charles  "  to  the 
other  boys:  '"so  Christians  should  call  one 
another,"  he  used  to  say.  Reason  revolts  and 
imagination  cowers  appalled  before  the  forlorn 
and  hopeless  conception  of  Wordsworth  ad- 
dressed as  "  Willie,"  or  Coleridge  as  "  Sam  "  ! 
For,  you  see,  //lis  man  never  posed,  never 
paraded  himself,  had  no  jealousy,  nor  petu- 
lance, nor  pettiness.  He  never  lied  for  effect, 
nor  harboured  hypocrisies,  big  or  little.  He 
was  lucky  in  possessing  that   supreme  antidote 


64  Footprints  of  Charles  Lamb. 


to  the  pernicious  poison  of  conceit — an  abiding 
sense  of  humour — "  a  genius  in  itself,  and  so 
defends  from  the  insanities,"  in  Emerson's  wise 
words.  Your  solemn  ass  must  needs  take 
himself  seriously  ;  the  man  of  deep,  keen,  quick 
perception  of  the  ludicrous  can  never  do  so. 
When  Coleridge,  during  a  visit  of  the  brother 
and  sister  to  him  at  Nether  Stowey,  addressed 
to  Lamb  his  maudlin  lines,  entitled  "  This 
Lime-Tree  Bower  my  Prison,"  in  which  he 
gushes  over  "  my  gentle-hearted  Charles,"  the 
victim  of  these  verses  rebelled.  "  For  God's 
sake,  don't  make  me  ridiculous  by  terming 
me  gentle-hearted  in  print,  or  do  it  in  better 
verse  !  Substitute  drunken  dog,  ragged-head, 
seld-shaven,  odd-eyed,  stuttering,  and  any 
other  epithet  which  truly  and  properly  belongs 
to  the  gentleman  in  question." 

"  Stat  viagni  iiominis  nuibra "  is  Lucan's 
stately  phrase,  to  be  aptly  applied,  in  its  best 
and  original  sense,  to  almost  every  one  of  this 
illustrious  group.  Yet,  lofty  as  they  loom  in 
the  distance,  far  above  our  power  as  well  as  our 
desire  to  belittle  them,  it  may  be  not  beyond 
belief   that  too  close  and   too  constant  contact 


Footprints  of  Charles  Lamb.  6^ 


with  some  of  them  might  have  brought  at  the 
last  a  certain  satiety.  It  may  even  be  breathed, 
without  irreverence  and  therefore  without 
offence,  that  we  might  have  been  just  a  bit 
bored  if  allowed  to  listen  without  rest  to 
Coleridge,  with  his  rhetorical  preachments  and 
his  melancholy,  both  born  of  rheumatism,  rum, 
and  opium  ;  or  to  Hazlitt,  with  his  ingrained 
selfishness,  his  petulance,  his  tea-inspired  tur- 
gidity ;  or  to  Wordsworth,  solemnly  weighted 
with  the  colossal  conviction  of  his  own  mission, 
and  tireless  in  his  tenacity  to  attest  the  truth 
thereof  to  all  listeners.  These,  and  all  those 
lesser  ones,  seem  to  me  petty  and  tiresome 
beside  this  spare,  silent,  stammering  little 
fellow,  who  loved  them  all  and  laughed  at  them 
all ;  who  gave  them  fitting  reverence,  and  yet, 
with  affectionate  adroitness,  found  fun  in  their 
foibles  ! 

How  direct  and  delicate  was  his  gibe  when 
Coleridge  had  been  longer  even  than  usual  in 
his  endless  endeavours  to  spin  serviceable 
ropes  with  his  metaphysical  sands:  "Oh,  you 
mustn't  mind  what  Coleridge  says  ;  he's  so  full 
of   his   fun."     I    can    see    his    twinkling  eyes — 


66  Footprints  of  Charles  Lamb. 


those  wonderfully  sparkling  eyes — as  he  an- 
swered Coleridge's  question,  "  Charles,  did  you 
ever  hear  me  preach  ?  "  "I  never  heard  you  do 
anything  else  !  "  Coleridge  was,  indeed,  quite 
capable,  in  Ifazlitt's  sarcastic  phrase,  of  taking 
up  the  deep  pauses  of  conversation  between 
seraphs  and  cardinals  ;  and  could  have  argued 
— with  the  same  ready  confidence  with  which, 
according  to  mocking  Sydney  Smith,  Lord 
John  Russell  would  have  assumed  command, 
at  half  an  hour's  notice,  of  the  channel  fleet 
— on  either  side  of  the  theses  sent  him  by 
Lamb  just  before  he  went  to  Germany. 
These  questions — "  to  be  defended  or  op- 
pugned (or  both)  at  Leipsic  or  Gottingen,"  by 
Coleridge — are  deliciously  sly  and  sharp  in 
their  stab  at  the  complacent  superiority  over 
lesser  gifted  mortals  felt  and  shown  by  that 
"  archangel  a  litde  damaged."  I  can  hear  the 
falsetto  tone  of  his  moralities  growing  shriller 
before  these  two  questions,  especially,  among 
the  others :  "  Whether  God  loves  a  lying 
angel  better  than  a  true  man?"  "Whether 
the  higher    order  of   seraphim    illuminati    ever 


Footprints  of  Charles  Lamb.  67 


How  deftly  he  punctured  Wordsworth's  sub- 
lime conceit,  on  his  hinting  that  other  poets 
might  have  equalled  Shakespeare  if  they  cared. 
"  Oh,  here's  Wordsworth  says  he  could  have 
written  '  Hamlet  '  if  Jicd  had  tJie  mind.  It  is 
clear  that  nothing  is  wanting  but  the  mind  I  " 
Even  the  Infallible  One  not  only  tolerated,  but 
valued,  the  acute  criticisms  with  which  Lamb 
leavened  his  discerning  praise  of  all  his  friends' 
work;  but  when  he,  with  kindly  frankness, 
rated  a  little  lower  than  did  their  author  the 
"  Lyrical  Ballads,"  that  author  got  into  quite 
a  state  of  mind.  He  "wrote  four  sweating 
pages"  to  inspire  Lamb  with  a  " greater  range 
of  sensibility  ;  "  and  the  tormented  critic  bursts 
out :  "  After  one's  been  reading  Shakespeare  for 
twenty  of  the  best  years  of  one's  life,  to  have 
a  fellow  start  up  and  prate  about  some  unknown 
quality  possessed  by  Shakespeare  less  than  by 
Milton  and  William  Wordsworth  !  .  .  .  What 
am  I  to  do  with  such  people?  I  shall  certainly 
write  'em  a  very  merry  letter."  I  wish  that 
letter  had  been  saved  for  our  delectation. 

Then  there  was  Manning,  with  his  slight 
sense  of  humour,  and   to  him — then   in   China. 


68  Footprints  of  Charles  Lamb. 

to  his  friend's  loss — Lamb  loved  to  write  the 
maddest  inventions,  and  let  loose  his  wildest 
whims  about  their  friends.  To  Coventry  Pat- 
more,  on  his  way  to  Paris,  he  wrote,  in  an 
amazing  letter :  "If  you  go  through  Boulogne, 
inquire  if  old  Godfrey  is  living,  and  how  he 
got  home  from  the  Crusades.  He  must  be  a 
very  old  man  now." 

Good,  honest  barrister  Martin  Burney — of  the 
"If  dirt  were  trumps"  story — gave  infinite  fun 
to  Lamb  by  his  oddities.  Once  he  read  aloud, 
in  their  rooms,  the  whole  Gospel  of  St.  John, 
because  biblical  quotations  are  very  emphatic 
in  a  court  of  justice.  At  another  time  he  in- 
sisted on  carving  the  fowl — and  did  it  most  ill- 
favouredly — because  it  was  indispensable  for  a 
barrister  to  do  all  such  things  well.  "Those 
little  things  were  of  more  consequence  than  we 
thought  !  "  Burney  quite  approved  of  Shake- 
speare, "  because  he  was  so  much  of  a  gentle- 
man;" and  he  said  and  did  so  many  queer  things 
that  Lamb  wrote  :  "  Why  does  not  his  guardian 
angel  look  to  him  ?  He  deserves  one  ;  maybe 
he  has  tired  Jiivi  out  !  " 

It    was    George    Dyer,    above    all,    in    whom 


Footprints  of  Charles  Lamb.  69 


Lamb  revelled,  and  who  was  meat  and  drink  to 
him.  Dyer  was  the  son  of  a  Wapping  watch- 
man and  butcher,  had  been  a  charity-school  boy 
at  Christ's,  and  had  become  a  publisher's  harm- 
less drudge.  He  was  a  true  bookworm,  eating 
his  way  through  thick  tomes,  but  digesting  lit- 
tle. He  seemed  to  find  all  the  nourishment 
he  needed  in  the  husks  of  knowledge,  while 
Lamb,  in  radical  contrast,  bit  to  the  kernel 
with  his  incisive  teeth.  As  to  Dyer's  heart, 
however,  his  friend  was  sure  that  God  never 
put  a  kinder  into  the  flesh  of  man  ;  and  his 
was  a  simple,  unsuspecting  soul.  He  was  so 
absent-minded  that  he  would  sometimes  empty 
his  snuff-box  into  his  teapot,  when  making  tea 
for  his  guests ;  and  so  near-sighted  that  he 
once  walked  placidly  into  the  river,  as  I  shall 
hereafter  relate.  He  used  to  keep  his  "  neat 
library"  in  the  seat  of  his  easy-chair.  Mary 
Lamb  and  Mrs.  Hazlitt,  going  to  his  chambers 
one  day  in  his  absence,  "  tidied-up  "  the  rooms 
and  sewed  fast  that  out-of-repair  easy-chair, 
with  his  books  within  it  :  whereat,  to  use  his 
own  violent  language,  he  was  greatly  discon- 
certed ! 


70  Footprints  of  Charles  Lamb. 


Lamb  gives  a  ludicrous  description  of  his 
visit  to  these  same  chambers  in  Clifford's  Inn, 
where  he  found  Dyer,  "  in  mid-winter,  wearing 
nankcoi  pantaloons  four  times  too  big  for  him, 
which  the  said  heathen  did  pertinaciously 
affirm  to  be  new.  These  were  absolutely  in- 
grained with  the  accumulated  dirt  of  ages,  but 
he  affirmed  'em  to  be  clean.  He  was  going  to 
visit  a  lady  who  was  nice  about  those  things, 
and  that's  the  reason  he  wore  nankeen  that 
day!"  It  was  to  this  credulous  creature  that 
Lamb  confided  that  the  secret  author  of 
"  Waverley  "  was  Lord  Castlereagh  !  And  once 
he  sent  the  guileless  one  to  Primrose  Hill  at 
sunrise,  to  see  the  Persian  Ambassador  perform 
his  orisons !  No  one  but  Dyer  could  have  said 
that  the  assassin  of  the  Ratcliffe  Highway — 
painted  so  luridly  by  De  Quincey  in  his 
"  Three  Memorable  Murders  " — "  must  have 
been  rather  an  eccentric  character  !  " 

Haydon,  the  painter,  has  told  of  one  memo- 
rable evening  in  his  own  studio,  when  Lamb 
was  in  marvellous  vein,  and  met  that  immortal 
Comptroller  of  Stamps  who  had  begged  to  be 
introduced    to  Wordsworth,   and    who    insisted 


Footprints  of  Charles  Lamb.  71 


on  having  the  latter's  opinion  as  to  whether 
Milton  and  Newton  were  not  great  geniuses. 
Lamb  took  a  candle  and  walked  over  to  the 
poor  man,  saying,  "  Sir,  will  you  allow  me  to 
look  at  your  phrenological  development  ? " 
Haydon  and  Keats  got  him  away,  but  he 
persisted  in  bursting  into  the  room,  shouting, 
"  Do  let  me  have  another  look  at  that  gentle- 
man's organs."  Edgar  Poe's  Imp  of  the  Per- 
verse took  entire  possession  of  Lamb  when 
thrown  with  uncongenial  men,  and  forced  him 
to  give  the  impression  of  "  something  between 
an  imbecile,  a  brute,  and  a  buffoon."  Writing 
of  himself  after  the  imaginary  death  of  Elia, 
he  says,  truly:  "He  never  greatly  cared  for 
the  society  of  what  are  called  good  people.  If 
any  of  these  were  scandalized  (and  offences 
were  sure  to  arise)  he  could  not  help  it." 

No,  nor  did  he  try  to  help  it,  and  we  love 
him  all  the  more  for  this  antic  disposition  he 
was  so  fond  of  showing  unshamed.  And  I 
think  that  we  need  not  grieve  greatly  because 
his  vagaries  were  not  kept  always  "  within  the 
limits  of  becoming  mirth,"  when  he  had  to  deal 
with  prigs,  pedants,   or  poseurs.     Tom  Moore, 


72  Footprints  of  Charles  Lamb. 

tiptoe  with  toadyism,  tried  to  look  down 
on  Lamb,  doubtless  feeling  that  he  had  accu- 
rately sounded  the  shoals  of  his  shallow  insin- 
cerity. The  portentous  Macready  has  left  on 
record  his  unfavourable  impression  of  the 
irreverent  creature  who  stood  in  no  awe 
of  superior  persons  on  pasteboard  pedestals. 
That  impression  pains  us  no  more  than  does 
the  ungentle  judgment  of  Thomas  Carlyle. 
He  found  Lamb's  talk  to  be  but  "  a  ghastly 
make-believe  of  wit,"  "contemptibly  small;" 
and  in  all  that  w-as  said  and  done  he  saw, 
from  his  own  humane  point  of  view,  noth- 
ing but  "diluted  insanity."  Curtly  and  cruelly 
he  labelled  this  brother  and  sister,  "  two  very 
sorry  phenomena." 

If  our  friend  laughed  at  others,  he  was  just 
as  ready  to  laugh  at  himself ;  and  his  hissing  his 
own  play  is  historic.  It  is  strange  that,  with 
his  keen  critical  sense,  he  should  have  hoped 
for  the  success  of  this  "  Mr.  H.,  A  Farce  in  Two 
Acts  ;  "  produced  at  Drury  Lane,  in  1806,  with 
the  great  Elliston  in  the  title-role.  Yet  he  had 
written  to  Manning  in  boyish  glee:  "All  China 
shall   ring  with  it — by  and   by."     In  the    same 


Footprints  of  Charles  Lamb.  73 

letter,  he  made  fanciful  designs  for  the  orders 
he  was  to  give  for  admission,  elate  with  antic- 
ipation of  the  long  run  his  piece  was  to  have. 
He  sat  on  the  opening  night  with  Mary  and 
Crabb  Robinson  in  the  front  of  the  pit  (his 
favourite  place),  and  joined  with  the  audience 
in  applauding  his  really  witty  prologue.  Then, 
as  the  luckless  farce  fell  flat  and  flatter,  he 
was  louder  than  any  of  them  in  their  hisses. 
"  Damn  the  word,  I  write  it  like  kisses — how 
different !  "  he  growled,  in  grotesque  wrath,  in 
his  letter  announcing  the  failure  to  Words- 
worth. Hazlitt,  who  was  present,  dreamed  of 
that  dreadful  damning  every  night  for  a  month, 
but  Lamb  only  wrote  to  him  :  "  I  know  you'll 
be  sorry,  but  never  mind.  We  are  deter- 
mined not  to  be  cast  down.  I  am  going  to 
leave  off  tobacco,  and  then  we  must  thrive. 
A  smoky  man  must  write  smoky  farces."  He 
and  Mary  were  "  pretty  stout  "  about  it,  but, 
after  all,  they  would  rather  have  had  success, 
he  had  to  own.  For  he  not  only  longed  for 
the  fame,  but  he  needed  the  money,  which 
that  success  in  dramatic  authorship  would 
have  brought. 


74  Footprints  of  Charles  Lamb. 


He  delighted  in  playing  all  sorts  of  pranks 
on  his  sister,  and  was  quick  to  improve  any 
occasion  to  tease  her.  Such  a  scene  is  de- 
scribed by  N.  P.  Willis,  in  his  "  Pencillings  by 
the  Way  ;  "  where  he  relates  his  meeting  and 
making  acquaintance  with  them,  at  a  friend's 
rooms  in  London.  He  and  Lamb  were  chat- 
ting, and  Mary,  not  quite  catching  all  their 
words— she  was  then  slightly  deaf — asked, 
"What  are  you  saying  of  me,  Charles?"  In- 
stantly he  answered  :  ''  Mr,  Willis  admires  your 
'  Confessions  of  a  Drunkard  '  very  much,  and 
I  was  saying  that  it  was  no  merit  of  yours  that 
you  understood  that  subject  !  "  She  took  all 
his  freaks  in  good  part,  translating  them  in  the 
light  of  her  affection  for  him,  and  of  her  fond- 
ness for  his  sweet  and  stingless  banter. 

His  sense  of  fun  bubbled  up  at  most  inapt 
times.  He  had  been  asked  once  to  stand  as 
godfather  for  a  friend's  child,  and  feared  he 
would  disgrace  himself  at  the  very  font.  "  I 
was  at  Hazlitt's  wedding  and  had  like  to  have 
been  turned  out  several  times  during  the  cere- 
mony. Anything  awful  makes  me  laugh ;  I 
misbehaved   once    at    a  funeral,"      In    all    this 


Footprints  of  Charles  Lamb.  73 

wayward  whimsicality,  one  can  detect  that 
same  depth  and  intensity  of  feeling  which 
moved  Abraham  Lincoln  to  tell  trivial  stories 
at  the  most  solemn  crises ;  which  suggests  a 
sob  beneath  the  maddest  mirth  of  Sterne, 
Moh^re,  Cervantes;  which  drove  Charles  Lamb 
to  seize  the  kettle  from  the  hob  and  hold  it  on 
his  sister's  head-dress,  like  the  clown  in  a  pan- 
tomime, to  hide  the  breaking  of  his  great  heart 
at  the  signs  of  the  coming  mania  he  had  de- 
tected in  her.  He  accounted  it  an  excellent 
thing  to  play  the  buffoon  sometimes,  and  was 
willing  to  seem  supremely  silly,  that  he  might 
save  his  own  sanity. 

Acting  conversely,  this  trembling  sensibility 
set  the  tears  trickling  down  his  cheeks,  while  he 
was  writing  a  playful  paper;  and  made  him  even 
"  shed  tears  in  the  motley  Strand,  for  fulness 
of  joy  of  so  much  life." 

His  largeness  of  soul  was  never  shown  in  a 
grander  way  than  in  his  letter  to,  and  his  whole 
conduct  toward,  Robert  Southey,  when  the  lat- 
ter attacked,  in  the  Qiiarterly  Review,  the  first 
collected  "  Essays  of  Elia  " — "  a  book  which 
wants  only   a   sounder   religious  feeling    to    be 


76  Footprints  of  Charles  Lamb. 


as  delightful  as  it  is  original."  In  the  same 
paper,  he  spoke  arrogantly  and  offensively  of 
Leigh  Hunt,  his  own  political  enemy,  and 
Lamb's  most  dear  and  most  unjustly  perse- 
cuted friend.  From  so  close  a  companion  as 
Southey  had  been,  and  one  who  knew  him 
so  thoroughly,  this  hurt  Lamb  deeply,  and  he 
wrote  to  Bernard  Barton :  "  But  I  love  and 
respect  Southey,  and  will  not  retort.  I  hate 
his  review  and  his  being  a  reviewer."  And  in 
the  London  Magazine  he  put  forth  the  manly 
"  Letter  of  Elia  to  Robert  Southey,  Esq.;"  of 
which  the  latter  said  that  'no  resentful  let- 
ter was  ever  written  less  offensively."  Then 
Southey — an  exemplary  if  over-righteous  mor- 
tal— sent  Lamb  a  line  of  regret  and  affection, 
and  Lamb  wrote  generously  back,  and  the  mists 
were  melted  away,  and  their  friendship  shone 
more  steadfastly  than  ever.  Indeed,  it  seems 
to  me  that  Southe}-  eclipsed  Lamb  in  the  spirit 
he  showed  in  this  reconciliation,  forasmuch 
as  he  proved  himself  fine  enough  to  forgive 
the  man  whom  he  had  outraged.  We  may 
commend  his  conduct  ;  '*  For  right,  too  rigid, 
hardens  into  wrong." 


Footprints  of  Charles  Lamb.  77 

It  is  no  part  of  my  plan  to  dwell  on  Lamb's 
religious  belief.  Suffice  it  to  say  that  it  was, 
like  that  of  most  Unbelievers,  too  large  to  be 
labelled  by  a  set  of  dogmas,  too  spacious  to  be 
packed  within  church  or  cathedral  walls.  It  is 
a  stale  truism  that  credence,  less  than  charac- 
ter, is  the  criterion  of  conviction  ;  and  all  his- 
tory shows  that  the  doubters  are,  in  nearly  all 
cases,  the  most  deeply  devout.  "  He  prayeth 
well  who  loveth  well,"  Coleridge  had  learned  ; 
and  it  is  my  fancy  that  those  lives,  where  love 
with  voluntary  humility  waited  on  self-sacri- 
fice, had  taught  him  the  immanent  truth — ''  He 
prayeth  best,  who  loveth  best." 

As  to  Lamb's  utterances  about  these  mighty 
matters,  we  may  be  sure  that  they  took  the 
tone  of  the  man's  utterances  concerning  all 
matters;  and  to  them  we  may  apply  Hazlitt's 
phrase  :  "  His  jests  scald  like  tears,  and  he 
probes  a  question  with  a  play  upon  words." 
Or,  as  Haydon  put  it,  "  He  stuttered  out  his 
quaintness  in  snatches,  like  the  fool  in  '  Lear'." 


IV. 


IiS"  the  midst  of  the  vast  Covent  Garden  prop- 
erty of  the  Duke  of  Bedford  is  wedged  a  small 
piece  of  alien  land,  on  the  corner  of  Bow  and 
Russell  streets.  It  belongs  to  a  certain  Clayton 
estate,  and  is  covered  by  three  houses,  which 
are  worth  more  to  us  than  all  the  potentialities 
of  marketable  wealth  hereabout.  These  three 
houses  formed  but  one  building,  at  the  time  of 
erection  ;  which  was  late  in  the  last  or  early  in 
the  present  century,  as  we  may  be  convinced  by 
every  architectural  point  of  proof  without  and 
within.  It  was  built  on  the  site  of  that  famous 
ancient  structure  whose  upper  floor  was  occu- 
pied by  Will's  Coffee-House ;  its  cellars  and 
foundations  still  to  be  traced  under  the  esti- 
mable Ham  and  Beef  Shop  on  that  corner. 
To-day,  this  popular  establishment  is  thronged 
for  us,  not  with  its  actual  eager  buyers  of  cold 
baked  meats,  but  with  the  shades  of  Addison, 
Swift,    Smollett,   Steele,    Dryden,  Gibber,   Gay, 


NO.  20    RUSSELL   STREET,  COVENT   llAUUKN.^ 


Footprints  of  Charles  Lamb.  79 


Pepys,  Johnson,  revisiting  their  once  favourite 
foregathering  place. 

Of  the  three  houses  into  which  this  block  of 
buildings  has  been  divided,  the  corner  house 
remains  entirely  unaltered.  Its  neighbour,  in 
Bow  Street — now  a  swarming  tavern — has  suf- 
fered somewhat  at  the  hand  of  the  modern  re- 
storer. It  retains,  on  its  upper  floor,  a  small 
barred  cell,  formerly  set  apart  for  some  exclu- 
sive or  elusive  prisoner  from  Bow  Street  sta- 
tion, just  at  hand. 

The  house  which  chiefly  concerns  us.  No. 
20  Russell  Street,  has  been  made  higher  by  one 
story,  re-roofed,  and  re-faced  with  stucco  ;  but 
it  has  not  been  distinctly  disfeatured. 

Such  as  it  was,  it  became  the  next  home  of 
the  Lambs,  in  181 7.  At  that  time  they  had 
lived  for  nine  years  in  their  chambers  in  Inner 
Temple  Lane,  and  it  is  strange  that  they 
should  have  been  willing  to  leave  their  be- 
loved Temple,  after  having  been  born  into  it 
again,  and  after  having  grown  up  in  it  again. 
For  Lamb's  household  gods  planted  a  terrible 
fixed  foot,  as  he  put  it,  and  were  not  rooted 
up  without  blood.     "  I  thought  we  could  never 


8o  Footprints  of  Charles  Lamb. 


have  been  torn  up  from  the  Temple,"  he 
wrote ;  yet  they  did  so  tear  themselves  up, 
and  we  are  left  to  conjecture,  for  their  reasons. 
Mary  told  Dorothy  Wordsworth  that  the 
rooms  had  got  dirty  and  out  of  repair,  and 
that  the  cares  of  living  in  chambers  had 
grown  more  irksome  each  year.  More  weighty 
among  their  motives,  no  doubt,  was  the  desire 
to  escape  the  incessant  invasion  of  their  pri- 
vacy by  welcome,  and  yet  unwelcome,  friends. 
From  this  wear  and  tear  they  were  not  freed 
by  their  flight,  however. 

In  November,  1817,  Lamb  wrote  to  Dorothy 
Wordsworth  :  "We  are  in  the  individual  spot  I 
like  best  in  all  this  great  city.  The  theatres 
with  all  their  noises ;  Covent  Garden,  dearer  to 
me  than  any  gardens  of  Alcinous,  where  we  are 
morally  sure  of  the  earliest  peas  and  'sparagus  ; 
Bow  Street,  where  the  thieves  are  examined, 
within  a  few  yards  of  us.  Mary  had  not  been 
here  four-and-twenty  hours  before  she  saw  a 
thief.  She  sits  at  the  window  working  ;  and, 
casually  throwing  out  her  eyes,  she  sees  a 
concourse  of  people  coming  this  way,  with  a 
constable    to    conduct    the    ceremony.      These 


Footprints  of  Charles  Lamb.  8i 


little  incidents  agreeably  diversify  a  female 
life." 

Besides  these  novel  sights,  they  found 
strange  sounds  in  their  new  abode.  A  bra- 
zier's hammers  were  rankling  all  day  long 
within,  and  by  night  without— but  let  Mary 
tell  it,  in  her  letter  to  Dorothy  Wordsworth : 
*'  Here  we  are  living  at  a  brazier's  shop.  No. 
20,  in  Russell  Street,  Covent  Garden — a  place 
all  alive  with  noise  and  bustle ;  Drury  Lane 
Theatre  in  sight  from  our  front,  and  Covent 
Garden  from  our  back  windows.  .  .  .  The 
hubbub  of  the  carriages  returning  from  the 
play  doesn't  annoy  me  in  the  least — strange 
that  it  doesn't,  for  it  is  quite  tremendous.  I 
quite  enjoy  looking  out  of  the  window,  and 
listening  to  the  calling  up  of  the  carriages, 
and  the  squabbles  of  the  coachmen  and  link- 
boys." 

They  squabble  still  of  a  foggy  night—"  a  real 
London  partic'ler " — and  the  noise  is  even 
greater  now  than  it  was  then,  and  Covent 
Garden  is  filthier  than  ever,  and  the  thieves 
go  by  escorted  by  a  "  bobby,"  and  attended 
by  a  crowd  ;   but  the  brazier  no  longer  brazes, 


82  Footprints  of  Charles  Lamb. 


and  his  discordant  shop  is  now  inoffensive 
with  noiseless  fruits. 

Here  they  lived  until  1823,  these  six  years 
filled  with  increasing  prosperity,  with  compara- 
tive comfort,  with  happy  friendships,  with  his 
best  work,  with  sudden  fame.  His  income  had 
slowly  increased  with  each  added  year  of 
service  in  the  East  India  House,  and  the  earn- 
ings of  his  literary  work  swelled  it  slightly. 
That  work  had  never  yet  received  its  recogni- 
tion. It  was  collected  and  published  in  two 
handsome  volumes  in  1818,  and  the  reading 
world  of  that  day  suddenly  awakened  to  see 
in  the  obscure  clerk,  plodding  daily  to  his  desk 
in  Leadenhall  Street,  its  most  delicate  humour- 
ist, its  most  acute  critic,  its  most  perfect  essay- 
ist. A  little  later,  inspired  by  this  success,  he 
set  to  work  in  these  rooms  in  Russell  Street 
on  his  "  Elia"  papers,  begun  in  the  new  London 
]\Iagazinc  for  August,  1820. 

So  he  outgrew  his  gloom  and  grew  gayer, 
although  he  was  never  for  one  hour  out  of  the 
shadow  of  Mary's  constant  imminent  danger  of 
a  relapse.  He  drew  around  him  many  new 
acquaintances,  especially  the  theatrical   folk  of 


Footprints  of  Ch;nies  Lamb.  83 

this  quarter,  and  more  and  more  of  the  "  friendly 
harpies  "  he  was  fond  of,  on  whom  he  spent  his 
time  and  squandered  his  strength.  He  needed 
all  he  could  save  of  time  and  strength  for  his 
evening  work  on  his  Essays,  after  his  day's 
work  at  his  desk.  Yet  he  not  only  was  not 
allowed  to  attend  to  literary  labour,  but  he 
complained  that  he  could  not  even  write  let- 
ters at  home,  because  he  was  never  alone  ;  and 
had  to  seize  odd  moments  for  all  such  writ- 
ing at  his  ofifice  and  from  his  work  in  East 
India  House.  Stationery,  too,  he  seized  there ; 
and  some  of  his  unapproachable  letters  were 
written  on  printed  official  forms  concerning 
"  statements  of  the  weights  and  amounts  of 
the  following  lots"!  His  task-masters  there 
would  have  gone  out  of  their  mercantile  minds 
could  they  have  made  accurate  estimates  of 
the  hard  money  value  to  be  put  by  posterity 
on  those  "following  lots"  which  he  thus  un- 
ofificially  filled  in  ! 

Even  there  he  was  not  unmolested,  but  was 
constantly  "called  ofT  to  do  the  deposits  on 
cotton  wool,"  he  complained  when  writing  to 
Wordsworth.     "  But   why  do   I    relate    this    to 


84  Footprints  of  Charles  Lamb. 


you,  who  want  faculties  to  comprehend  the 
great  mystery  of  deposits,  of  interest,  of  ware- 
house rent,  and  of  contingent  fund?" 

So  his  growing  need  and  his  growing  want 
to  be  alone  were  never  gratified.  "  Except 
my  morning's  walk  to  the  of^fice,  which  is  like 
treading  on  sands  of  gold  for  that  reason,  I  am 
never  so — I  cannot  walk  home  from  ofifice  but 
some  officious  friend  offers  his  unwelcome  cour- 
tesies to  accompany  me.  All  the  morning  I 
am  pestered — evening  company  I  should  always 
like,  had  I  any  mornings,  but  I  am  saturated 
with  human  faces  {divine,  forsooth)  and  voices 
all  the  golden  morning.  ...  I  am  never 
C.  L.,  but  always  C.  L.  &  Co.  He  who  thought 
it  not  good  for  man  to  be  alone,  preserve  me 
from  the  more  prodigious  monstrosity  of  being 
never  by  myself."  He  could  not  even  eat  in 
peace,  for  his  familiars  were  with  him  putting 
questions — presumably  inopportune  questions 
— asking  his  opinions,  and  interrupting  him  in 
every  way.  "  Up  I  go,  mutton  on  table,  hun- 
gry as  a  hunter,  hope  to  forget  my  cares,  and 
bury  them  in  the  agreeable  abstraction  of  mas- 
tication.    Knock    at    the    door ;    in  comes   Mr. 


Footprints  of  Charles  Lamb.  85 


Hazlitt,  or  Mr.  Burney,  or  Morgan  Demi  Gor- 
gon, or  my  brother,  or  somebody  to  prevent 
my  eating  alone — a  process  absolutely  neces- 
sary to  my  poor,  wretched  digestion.  Oh,  the 
pleasure  of  eating  alone  ! — eating  my  dinner 
alone  !  let  me  think  of  it." 

He  did  think  of  it,  but  to  no  practicable 
remedial  end;  for,  if  he  hated  to  have  the  in- 
truders come,  he  hated  still  more  to  have  them 
go ;  and  he  had  to  avow,  "  God  bless  'em  ! 
I  love  some  of  'em  dearly  !" 

All  this  was  a  ceaseless  drain  on  his  vitality, 
and  a  ceaseless  strain  on  the  nerves  already  so 
overstrung.  He  wondered  how  "  some  people 
keep  their  nerves  so  nicely  balanced  as  they 
do,  or  have  they  any  ?  or  are  they  made  of 
pack-thread?  He"  (I  know  not  of  whom  he 
spoke)  "  is  proof  against  weather,  ingratitude, 
meat  underdone,  every  weapon  of  fate."  Lamb 
was  not  proof  against  good  friends,  his  sympa- 
thetic nature  going  out  perpetually  to  them 
to  his  own  loss.  Of  Coleridge  he  said :  "  The 
neighbourhood  of  such  a  man  is  as  exciting  as 
the  presence  of  fifty  ordinary  persons.  .  .  . 
If  I  lived  with  him,  or  with  the  author  of  '  The 


86  Footprints  of  Charles  Lamb. 

Excursion,'  I  should  in  a  very  little  time  lose 
my  own  identity."  Only  those  of  his  suscep- 
tible temperament  can  comprehend  this  con- 
fession, or  his  characteristic  commendation  of 
John  Rickman,  Clerk  of  the  House  of  Com- 
mons, a  newly  made  and  highly  valued  friend  : 
"  He  understands  you  the  first  time.  Von  need 
never  tzvice  speak  to  hi  in.'' 

Such  were  the  tremulous  nerves  which 
seemed  to  need  the  stimulus  of  alcohol,  and 
which  were  so  easily  swayed  and  upset  by  it. 
The  lachrymose  and  dolorous  tones  of  Re- 
spectability are  forever  croaking  loud  in  lam- 
entation that  Lamb  was  a  Drunkard.  It  is 
not  true.  He  was  no  drunkard.  He  could 
not  have  been  a  drunkard  with  his  delicate 
organization.  I  believe  that  he  suffered,  un- 
knowingly withal,  from  the  malady  now  named 
nervous  dyspepsia;  to  which  he  was  a  vic- 
tim, partly  by  inheritance,  largely  by  his 
own  indiscretions.  He  was  careless  in  his 
habits,  in  his  diet,  in  his  exercise — walking 
often  at  unfitting  hours  and  for  excessive 
hours — and  he  had  no  regard  at  all  for  any 
sort  of  proper  precautions.     Although  habitu- 


Footprints  of  Charles  Lamb.  87 


ally  given  to  plain  fare,  and  no  gormandizer, 
he  was  at  times  fond  of  outrageous  dishes,  and 
fearless  in  his  appalling  experiments  on  his  di- 
gestive machinery.  He  audaciously  claimed  for 
himself  the  stomach  of  Heliogabalus !  Like 
Thackeray,  he  had  the  courage  of  his  gastro- 
nomic convictions,  and  he  has  left  an  imperish- 
able record  of  his  love  for  roast  pig,  cow-heel, 
and  brawn.  "  I  am  no  Quaker  at  my  food — I 
confess  I  am  not  indifferent  to  the  kinds  of  it. 
.  .  .  I  hate  a  man  who  swallows  it,  affect- 
ing not  to  know  what  he  is  eating  ;  I  suspect 
his  taste  in  higher  matters.  I  shrink  instinc- 
tively from  one  who  professes  to  like  minced 

veal  " — admirable  appreciation  !     "  C holds 

that  a  man  cannot  have  a  pure  mind  who  re- 
fuses apple-dumplings — I  am  not  sure  but  he  is 
right."  And  about  a  pig,  just  then  roasting,  he 
wrote  to  Wordsworth :  "  How  beautiful  and 
strong  those  buttered  onions  come  to  my 
nose  ! "  He  could  snatch  a  fearful  joy  even 
from  that  baleful  refection,  cold  brawn  ;  and 
only  at  the  thought  thereof,  as  he  is  writing,  he 
glows  with  esurient  unction.  "  'Tis,  of  all  my 
hobbies,  the  supreme  in  the  eating  way.     .     .     . 


88  Footprints  of  Charles  Lamb. 


It   is  like  a  picture   of  one  of  the  old  Italian 
masters ;  its  gusto  is  of  that  hidden  sort." 

Conscientious  in  his  cultivation  of  these  ad- 
mirably abnormal  appetites  ;  fond  of  heavy,  late 
suppers;  addicted  to  too  much  tobacco;  with 
friends  forever  to  the  fore  to  interest,  stimulate, 
and  thus  unnerve  him  ;  and  with  the  unceasing 
terror  that  hung  over  their  home  and  gave  it 
its  profound  depression,  it  is  small  wonder 
that  he  found  in  alcohol  just  what  he  needed, 
and  just  what  he  should  not  have  depended 
upon  !  He  would  tipple  at  times,  and  now  and 
then  he  did  get  drunk,  I  do  not  deny ;  but 
never  twice  in  the  same  house,  as  he  truthfully 
assured  a  lady !  That  was  a  redeeming  habit, 
surely.  The  fact,  put  in  a  word,  is  that  he  was 
affected  by  incredibly  small  quantities  of  stimu- 
lants, and  as  high  as  they  pulled  up  his  spirits, 
even  so  correspondingly  low  did  his  spirits  sink 
afterward.  His  agonies  of  remorse,  following  a 
slight  excess,  were  morbid,  fantastic,  never  to 
be  taken  as  true  to  the  letter.  After  a  trifling 
tipsy  quarrel  with  Walter  Wilson,  he  sent  an 
apology,  and  added  :  "  You  knew  well  enough 
before  that  a  very  little  liquor  will  cause  a  con- 


Footprints  of  Charles  Lamb.  89 

siderable  alteration  in  me."  Mary  wrote  fre- 
quently :  "  He  came  home  very  smoky  and 
drinky  last  night  ; "  and  then  he  would  re- 
proach himself  the  day  after  for  "  wasting  and 
teasing  her  life  for  five  years  past  incessantly 
with  my  cursed  drinking  and  ways  of  going 
on."  His  spasmodic  efforts  at  reform  were 
born  of  these  extravagant  self-accusings,  and 
were  equally  needless  and  fruitless.  "  I  am 
afraid  I  must  leave  off  drinking.  I  am  a  poor 
creature,  but  I  am  leaving  off  gin."  And  he 
did  leave  it  off,  with  a  moral  certainty  of  his 
abstinence  lasting  until  his  feeble  stomach 
clamoured  for  so  much  porter  in  its  place  that 
Mary  herself  had  to  beg  him  "  to  live  like  him- 
self once  more." 

His  "  Farewell  to  Tobacco  "  was  more  suc- 
cessful, and  more  permanent ;  it  was  not  only 
"  his  sweet  enemy,"  but  really  his  worst  enem}-. 
"  Liquor  and  company  and  wicked  tobacco, 
o'  nights,  have  quite  dis-pericraniated  me,  as 
one  may  say  ;  "  and  of  these  three  delights 
wicked  tobacco  was  to  him  the  most  delightful, 
and  withal  the  most  dangerous.  And  so  we 
must  not    consider    too    curiously    his    famous 


90  Footprints  of  Charles  Lamb. 


"  Confessions  of  a  Drunkard,"  with  its  terrible, 
eloquent  passage,  beginning  with  this  unfair 
and  unfounded  introspection:  "To  be  an  ob- 
ject of  compassion  to  friends,  of  derision  to 
foes ;  to  be  suspected  by  strangers,  stared  at 
by  fools."  We  are  glad  and  proud  to  take  him 
as  we  find  him — full  of  frailties,  just  as  we 
poorer  mortals  are  ;  it  is  not  for  us  to  sit  in 
judgment  on  him  ;  we  say  to  the  Philistines, 
in  Wordsworth's  benignant  words,  "  Love  him 
or  leave  him  alone." 

It  was  during  the  latter  period  of  their  resi- 
dence in  the  Temple,  and  during  their  six  years 
in  Russell  Street,  that  Lamb  produced  the 
greater  part  of  the  work  he  has  left — small  in 
sum  but  great  in  achievement.  It  is  not  the 
province  of  this  study  to  dwell  on  his  various 
literary  performances,  but  it  comes  within  my 
scope  to  speak  of  his  sister's  assistance  in  that 
literary  labour.  In  all  matters  he  depended 
greatly  upon  her.  "  She  is  older  and  wiser  and 
better  than  I,  and  all  my  wretched  imperfec- 
tions I  cover  to  myself  by  resolutely  thinking 
on  her  goodness."  During  each  frequent  re- 
currence  of   her    pitiful    craze — when    she    was 


Footprints  of  Charles  Lamb.  91 

forced  to  be  "  from  home,"  as  he  lovingly  and 
tenderly  phrased  it — he  was  lost  and  helpless. 
"  I  miss  a  prop.  All  my  strength  is  gone,  and 
I  am  like  a  fool,  bereft  of  her  co-operation.  I 
dare  not  think,  lest  I  should  think  wrong,  so 
used  am  I  to  look  up  to  her  in  the  least  as  in 
the  biggest  perplexity." 

He  did  not  overrate  her.  She  w^is  no  com- 
monplace creature,  and  she  impressed  all  who 
knew  her  well  as  a  woman  of  fine  judgment, 
of  noteworthy  good  sense,  full  of  womanly 
sympathies,  sweet  and  serene.  Hazlitt  com- 
mended her  as  the  wisest  and  most  rational 
woman  he  had  ever  known.  With  strangers 
she  was  unpretentious,  mild  of  manner,  reticent 
rather  than  loquacious.  In  her  bearing  towards 
her  brother  she  was  gentle  and  gracious  always, 
and  she  had  a  way  of  letting  her  eyes  follow 
him  everywhere  about  the  room,  in  company. 
When  looking  directly  at  him  she  had  often  an 
upward,  pleading,  peculiar  regard.  Mrs.  Anne 
Gilchrist,  in  her  admirable  monograph,  has 
called  attention  to  the  rare  tact — excellent 
thing  in  woman  ! — shown  by  Mary  in  dealing 
with     her   brother's    caprices   and    foibles,    all 


92  Footprints  of  Charles  Lamb. 


through  his  Hfe.  Indeed,  there  was  absolute 
inspiration  in  her  way  of  looking  at,  and  acting 
upon,  these  matters.  It  seemed  to  her  to  be  a 
vexatious  kind  of  tyranny,  which  women  use 
towards  men,  just  because  the  women  Jiavc 
better  judgi)ic)it^\.\\Q.  italics  are  her  own  !  She 
pours  forth  profuse  strains  of  unpremeditated 
wisdom,  in  this  same  letter  to  Sarah  Stoddart : 
"  Let  men  alone,  and  at  last  we  find  they  come 
around  to  the  right  way,  which  %ve,  by  a  kind 
of  intuition,  perceive  at  once.  But  better,  far 
better  that  we  should  let  them  often  do  wrong, 
than  that  they  should  have  the  torment  of  a 
monitor  always  at  their  elbows."'  Guided  by 
such  priceless  principles,  it  is  no  wonder  that 
she  succeeded  in  never  crossing  that  thin  line 
which  divides  the  domain  of  the  judicious  ad- 
viser, the  opportune  helper,  from  that  of  the 
untimely,  incessant,  ineffective  Nagger.  She 
once  said,  "  Our  love  for  each  other  has  been 
the  torment  of  our  lives" — torment  and  as- 
suagement together,  as  we  know,  and  made 
sweet  mainly  by  her  simple  sagacity. 

Regarding    her    personal    appearance,    Barry 
Cornwall   has   told   us  that  "  her  face  was   pale, 


Footprints  of  Charles  Lamb.  93 


and  somewhat  square,  very  placid,  with  gray- 
intelligent  eyes;"  and  De  Ouincey  called  her 
"that  Madonna-like  lady."  Her  smile  was  as 
winning  as  Charles's  own,  and  when  she  spoke, 
there  came  a  slight  catch  in  her  soft  voice,  un- 
conscious sisterly  reflex  of  his  stammer.  She 
was  below  the  medium  stature,  strongly  and 
somewhat  squarely  built. 

To  this  slight  sketch  of  her  looks  and  bear- 
ing may  be  added  these,  not  too  trivial  fond 
records,  of  her  manner  of  dressing.  Her  gown 
was  usually  plain,  of  black  stufT  or  silk  ;  but, 
on  festive  occasions,  she  came  out  in  a  dove- 
coloured  silk,  with  a  kerchief  of  snow-w4iite 
muslin  folded  across  her  bosom.  She  wore  a 
cap  of  the  kind  in  fashion  in  her  youth,  its 
border  deeply  frilled,  and  a  bow  on  the  top. 

I  cannot  finish  more  fitly  than  with  Barry 
Cornwall's  dainty  touch,  about  her  habit  of 
snufi"-taking,  in  common  with  Charles:  "She 
had  a  small,  white,  delicately  formed  hand,  and, 
as  it  hovered  above  the  tortoise-shell  snufT-box, 
the  act  seemed  another  link  of  association 
between  the  brother  and  sister,  as  they  sat  ov^er 
their  favourite  books." 


94  Footprints  of  Charles  Lamb. 


These  favourite  books  were  almost  all  the 
same,  chiefly  the  Elizabethan  dramatists,  not- 
ably Shakespeare;  but,  unlike  Charles — "nar- 
rative teases  ;//r,"  he  owned — she  was  fond  of 
modern  romance  and  read  many  novels.  "  She 
must  have  a  story — well,  ill,  or  indifferently 
told— so  there  be  life  stirring  in  it,"  Elia  wrote 
of  Bridget,  in  his  subtle  portraiture  of  her  in 
"  Mackery  End."  Otherwise  their  intellectual 
tastes  were  in  entire  accord  ;  and  she  was  but 
a  little  behind  him  in  having  almost  a  tinge  of 
genius  in  her  keen  critical  faculty.  She  came 
naturally  to  a  happy  command  of  pure  limpid 
English,  which  gave  to  her  style  the  charm  of 
her  own  personal  flavour.  This  flavour  was 
made  the  more  racy  by  a  delicate  humour, 
exceptional  in  her  sex. 

These  genuine  literary  qualities  first  had  a 
chance  to  show  themselves  in  the  year  1806, 
while  they  were  living  in  the  Temple.  Charles 
writes :  "  Mary  is  doing  for  Godwin's  book- 
seller twenty  of  Shakspeare's  plays,  to  be 
made  into  children's  tales.  ...  I  have 
done  '  Othello '  and  *  Macbeth,'  and  mean  to  do 
all  the   tragedies.     I    think   it    will    be  popular 


Footprints  of  Charles  Lamb.  95 


among  the  little  people,  besides  money.  It's 
to  bring  in  sixty  guineas.  Mary  has  done 
them  capitally,  I  think  }-ou'd  think."  And 
again:  "  Mary  is  just  stuck  fast  in  '  All's  Well 
that  Ends  Well.'  She  complains  of  having  to 
set  forth  so  many  female  characters  in  boy's 
clothes.  She  begins  to  think  Shakspeare 
must  have  wanted — imagination  !  "  And  she, 
too,  has  left  a  pretty  picture  of  their  com- 
mon work:  "You  would  like  to  see  us,  as  we 
often  sit  writing  on  one  table  (but  not  on 
one  cushion  sitting),  like  Hermia  and  Helena, 
in  the  '  Midsummer  Night's  Dream,'  or,  rather, 
like  an  old  literary  Darby  and  Joan,  I  taking 
snuff,  and  he  groaning  all  the  while,  and  saying 
he  can  make  nothing  of  it,  which  he  always 
says  till  he  has  finished,  and  then  he  finds 
out  he  has  made  something  of  it." 

She  certainly  had  the  more  difficult  task 
in  dealing  with  the  comedies,  and  it  was  she 
who  wrote  the  greater  part  of  the  preface,  an 
admirable  piece  of  musical  English,  ending  thus: 
" .  .  .  pretending  to  no  other  merit  than 
as  faint  and  imperfect  stamps  of  Shakespear's 
matchless  imagination,  whose  plays  are  strength- 


g6  Footprints  of  Charles  Lamb. 


eners  of  virtue,  a  withdrawing  from  all  selfish 
and  mercenary  thoughts,  a  lesson  of  all  honour- 
able thoughts  and  actions,  to  teach  courtesy, 
benignity,  generosity,  humanity."  The  little 
book — "  Tales  from  Shakespear,  Designed  for 
the  Use  of  Young  Persons,  Embellished  with 
Copper-plates,"  (by  Mulready) — came  out  in 
1807,  and  was  such  a  sudden  and  assured  suc- 
cess with  older  persons  as  well,  that  a  second 
edition  was  soon  called  for.  Frequent  editions 
are  still  in  demand.  The  new  preface  stated 
that,  though  the  tales  had  been  meant  for 
children,  "  they  were  found  adapted  better  for 
an  acceptable  and  improving  present  to  young 
ladies  advancing  to  the  state  of  womanhood." 
She  also  did  the  larger  share  of  "  Mrs.  Leices- 
ter's School  " — a  collection  of  charming  tales 
for  children,  over  some  of  which  Coleridge  used 
to  gush,  and  Landor  roar  in  admiration,  in  his 
best  Boythorn  manner.  A  volume  of  "  Poetry 
for  Children,  by  the  Author  of  '  Mrs.  Leicester's 
School,'  "  was  published  later.  After  this  her 
hterary  productions  consisted  only  of  occa- 
sional magazine  articles,  to  one  of  which,  "  On 
Needle-Work,"  I  have  already  referred. 


^,\s  ^ 


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iilii'lfrii. 


THE   COTfAGE    IN    COLEBROOK   ROW. 


Footprints  of  Charles  Lamb.  97 


For  the  stories  in  prose,  their  authoress  found 
the  local  scenery  and  colour  in  her  memories 
of  her  youthful  visits  to  Mackery  End  and  to 
Blakesware.  Indeed,  the  stories  are  supposed 
to  be  told  to  each  other  by  the  young  ladies  in 
a  school  at  Amvvell — the  rural  village  which 
slopes  up  from  the  Lea  and  the  New  River, 
only  one  mile  from  Ware. 

At  intervals  during  these  years,  there  had 
been  short  excursions  out  of  town,  longer 
country  trips,  and  journeys  to  visit  friends  far 
from  London.  Charles  had  spent  a  fortnight 
at  Nether  Stowey  with  Coleridge,  in  the  summer 
of  1797,  and  there  had  made  the  acquaintance 
of  William  Wordsworth  and  his  sister  Dorothy. 
She  was,  of  all  women  he  had  known,  Coleridge 
said,  "  the  truest,  most  inevitable  and,  at  the 
same  time,  the  quickest  and  readiest  in  sym- 
pathy with  either  joy  or  sorrow,  with  laughter 
or  with  tears,  with  the  realities  of  life,  or  the 
larger  realities  of  the  poets."  She  formed  a 
warm  friendship  for  Mary,  and,  like  her,  she  had 
clouds  come  over  her  reason,  though  not  till 
very  late  in  life. 

During  another  vacation,  Lamb  spent  a  few 
7 


98  Footprints  of  Charles  Lamb. 


days  with  HazHtt  in  Wiltshire,  and  in  other 
summer  holidays  he  visited  Oxford  and  Cam- 
bridge. He  bore  the  country  always  very 
bravely  for  the  sake  of  the  friends  with  whom 
he  was  staying. 

He  had  taken  Mary  to  Margate  in  early  years 
- — or,  maybe,  she  took  him,  for  she  was  then 
twenty-six  and  he  only  fifteen — and  he  has  toid 
us,  in  "■  The  Old  Margate  Hoy,"  of  this  their 
first  seaside  experience,  and  how  many  things 
combined  to  make  it  the  most  agreeable  holi- 
day of  his  life.  Neither  of  them  had  ever  seen 
the  sea,  then,  and  had  never  been  so  long  to- 
gether alone  and  from  home.  Many  years  after, 
during  his  holida}'s,  they  went  together  again 
to  the  seaside  at  Brighton  and  at  Hastings.  In 
1802,  he  was  seized  with  a  strong  desire  to  go 
to  remote  regions,  and  hurried  Mary  off  for  a 
stay  with  Coleridge  at  the  Lakes.  There  they 
passed  three  delightful  weeks,  although  not  in 
the  fairy-land  which  their  first  sunset  made 
them  think  they  had  come  into. 

Then  they  had  a  "  dear,  quiet,  lazy,  delicious 
month  "  with  the  Hazlitts,  at  Winterslow,  near 
Salisbury,  in  1809.     This  visit,  but  not  its  pleas- 


Footprints  of  Charles  Lamb.  99 


ure,  they  repeated  in  the  following  year;  and 
journeyed  from  there  to  Oxford,  Hazhtt  ac- 
companying them,  and  adding  to  their  dehght 
in  the  noble  university  town,  and  in  the  Blen- 
heim pictures. 

This  trip,  like  most  of  their  trips,  was  dearly 
paid  for  by  Mary's  illness.  The  fatigues,  the 
changes,  and  the  reaction  after  the  excitement 
of  society,  disturbed  her  accustomed  balance, 
nearly  always ;  sometimes  even  before  they 
reached  home.  So  surely  was  this  foreseen  that 
she  used  to  pack  a  strait  waistcoat  among  her 
effects,  on  starting  on  any  journey,  however 
short.  Her  most  distressing  attack  occurred  on 
their  way  to  Paris ;  a  tour  taken  with  needless 
rashness  in  the  summer  of  1822.  She  was  seized 
with  her  mania  in  the  diligence,  not  far  from 
Amiens,  and  had  to  be  left  there  in  charge  of 
the  nurse,  whom  they  had  taken  with  them  for 
just  this  emergency.  It  pleases  us  to  learn 
that  the  friend  who  met  and  helped  them  there 
was  an  American,  John  Howard  Payne.  He 
escorted  Mary  to  Paris,  when  she  was  fit  to 
travel,  two  months  later.  There  Crabb  Robin- 
son   met    them,    and    says:    "Her   only    male 


loo  Footprints  of  Charles  Lamb. 


friend  is  a  Mr.  Payne,  whom  she  praises  ex- 
ceedingly for  his  kindness  and  attention  to 
Charles.  He  is  the  author  of  '  Brutus,'  and 
has  a  good  face." 

In  the  following  year,  the  Lambs  were  able 
to  make  partial  requital  for  Payne's  good  ser- 
vices then,  by  helping  him  in  his  attempts  to 
produce  his  plays  and  adaptations  on  the 
London  and   Paris  boards. 

With  but  a  short  holiday  before  him,  and 
friends  awaiting  him  at  Versailles,  Charles  had 
gone  on  from  Amiens  as  soon  as  he  could  be 
spared  ;  and  had  to  leave  Paris  before  Mary's 
arrival.  She  found  there  a  characteristic  note 
from  him  for  her  guidance.  After  pointing  out 
a  few  pictures  in  the  Louvre  for  her  scrutiny — 
he  had  a  pretty  taste  in  painting  as  well  as  in 
engraving — he  told  her  :  "  You  must  walk  all 
along  the  borough  side  of  the  Seine,  facing 
the  Tuileries.  There  is  a  mile  and  a  half  of 
print-shops  and  book-stalls.  If  the  latter  were 
but  English  !  Then  there  is  a  place  where 
Paris  people  put  all  their  dead  people,  and 
bring  them  flowers  and  dolls  and  gingerbread 
nuts  and    sonnets,  and    such  trifles.     And  that 


Footprints  of  Charles  Lamb.  loi 


is  all,  I  think,  worth  seeing  as  sights,  except  that 
the  streets  and  shops  of  Paris  are  themselves 
the  best  sight,"  This  was  about  all — these 
sights,  the  folios  he  loved,  the  fricasseed  frogs 
he  learned  to  love,  and  his  meeting  with  Talma 
— that  he  brought  away  from  Paris.  Nor  has 
he  left  any  record  of  his  visit,  or  of  its  impres- 
sions on  him,  such  as  we  should  have  cherished. 


V. 


"  When  you  come  Londonward  you  will  find 
me  no  longer  in  Covent  Garden ;  I  have  a  cot- 
tage in  Colebrook  Row,  Islington  ;  a  cottage, 
for  it  is  detached  ;  a  white  house  with  six  good 
rooms  ;  the  New  River  (rather  elderly  by  this 
time)  runs  (if  a  moderate  walking  pace  can  be 
so  termed)  close  to  the  foot  of  the  house;  and 
behind  is  a  spacious  garden  with  vines  (I  assure 
you),  pears,  strawberries,  parsnips,  leeks,  car- 
rots, cabbages,  to  delight  the  heart  of  old  Al- 
cinous."  Thus  Lamb  wrote  on  September  2, 
1823,  to  Bernard  Barton. 

As  early  as  in  1806,  while  living  in  Mitre 
Court  Buildings,  and  anxious  to  finish  his  farce. 
Lamb  had  hired  a  room  outside  the  Temple. 
Here  he  could  work  in  quiet,  free  from  his  noc- 
turnal visitors — knock-eternal,  he  called  them, 
in  one  of  his  poorest  puns.  He  had  tried  the 
same  experiment  in  Russell  Street,  and  when 
that    refuge    failed    to    secure    privacy,  he  and 


'^t^ 


0  J 


Footprints  of  Charles  Lamb.  103 


Mary  used  to  slip  away  for  a  few  days  at  a  time 
to  furnished  lodgings  at  Dalston.  But  all  these 
strategic  devices  brought  only  double  discom- 
fort, and  they  finally  resolved  to  go  away  from 
town  altogether.  Also  they  thought  that  they 
would  like  to  have  a  whole  house  of  their  own, 
all  to  themselves.  Thus  it  came  that  the  letter 
quoted  above  was  written.  To  that  new  home 
I  now  invite  you  to  go  with  me. 

As  we  turn  from  the  City  Road  into  Cole- 
brook  Row,  we  find  an  almost  country  road  to- 
day, broad,  tree-lined,  a  strip  of  grass  running 
down  its  middle,  and  bordered  by  large,  old- 
fashioned  houses.  Beneath  it  flows  that  same 
New  River  to  its  reservoir  near  Sadler's  Wells, 
hard  by.  From  the  top  of  the  hill  we  catch  a 
glimpse  on  either  hand  of  the  Regent's  Canal, 
as  it  comes  out  from  the  tunnel  underneath; 
through  the  mouth  of  which  wheezes  and 
jangles  laboriously  the  round-topped  tug,  with 
its  chain  of  canal-boats.  It  is  a  pleasant  ap- 
proach to  "  Elia  " — as  the  present  owner  has 
re-christened  No.  19  Colebrook  Row — for  the 
many  pilgrims  from  all  over  the  English-speak- 
incr  world    to   whom    it    has    become  a    shrine. 


104  Footprints  of  Charles  Lamb, 


For  these  walls  hold  more  memories  of  the 
brother  and  sister  than  do  any  of  the  spots  we 
have  yet  seen.  It  stands  nearly  as  when  they 
lived  in  and  left  it,  though  no  longer  detached  ; 
a  simple  cottage  of  two  stories  and  an  attic, 
with  stone  steps  mounting  sideways.  Its  tiny 
front  garden,  flagged  and  flower-filled,  is  fenced 
off  discreetly  from  the  road,  a  Virginia  creeper 
climbing  over  the  railings. 

The  New  River  before  it  has  been  sodded 
over,  and  even  the  wool-gathering  George 
Dyer,  with  his  head  in  the  clouds,  could  not 
tumble  into  it  now.  That  was  one  of  the  most 
madly  ludicrous  scenes  ever  conceived,  and  was 
thus  described  by  Lamb :  "  I  do  not  know 
when  I  have  experienced  a  stranger  sensation 
than  on  seeing  my  old  friend  G.  D.,  who  had 
been  paying  me  a  morning  visit,  a  few  Sundays 
back,  at  my  cottage  at  Islington,  upon  taking 
leave,  instead  of  turning  down  the  right-hand 
path,  by  which  he  had  entered,  with  staff  in 
hand  and  at  noon-day,  deliberately  march  right 
forwards  into  the  midst  of  the  stream  that  runs 
by  us,  and  totally  disappear."  B.  W.  Procter 
(Barry  Cornwall)  happened  to  call    soon    after 


Footprints  of  Charles  Lamb.  105 


and  "  met  Miss  Lamb  in  the  passage,  in  a  state 
of  great  alarm — she  was  whimpering,  and  could 
only  utter,  '  Poor  Mr.  Dyer  !  poor  Mr.  Dyer  ! ' 
in  tremulous  tones.  I  went  upstairs  aghast, 
and  found  that  the  involuntary  diver  had 
been  placed  in  bed,  and  that  Miss  Lamb  had 
administered  brandy  and  water  as  a  well-estab- 
lished preventive  against  cold.  Dyer,  unaccus- 
tomed to  anything  stronger  than  the  '  crystal 
spring,'  was  sitting  upright  in  bed,  perfectly 
delirious.  His  hair  had  been  rubbed  up,  and 
stood  up  like  so  many  needles  of  iron-gray. 
He  did  not  (like  Falstaff)  '  babble  o'  green 
fields,'  but  of  the  '  watery  Neptune.'  '  I  soon 
found  out  where  I  was,'  he  cried  to  me,  laugh- 
ing ;  and  then  he  went  wandering  on,  his  words 
taking  flight  into  regions  where  no  one  could 
follow." 

The  "  cheerful  dining-room,  all  studded  over, 
and  rough,  with  old  books,"  is  level  with  the 
front  garden,  and  unchanged  except  that  its 
several  windows  have  now  been  cut  into  one 
large  one  :  as  also  has  been  done  above,  in  the 
"  lightsome  drawing-room,  three  windows,  full 
of    choice    prints."      The    prints   and    the   old 


io6  Footprints  of  Charles  Lamb. 


books  are  gone,  and  rigid  rows  of  decorous 
volumes  stare  stonily  from  their  shelves  ;  grim 
horsehair  chairs  refuse  the  aforetime  free  and 
unforced  invitation;  and  the  stuffed  corpses 
of  dead  birds,  and  other  framed  horrors  of  the 
period  all  about,  strike  terror  to  our  souls. 
Against  the  wall,  rears  itself  rigourously  a  prim 
piano,  from  which  Jic  would  have  fled  aghast ; 
for,  in  her  goodness,  nature  had  given  him  no 
taste  for  music,  and  he  never  had  to  pretend  to 
care  for  it.  He  was  constitutionally  susceptible 
of  noises,  and  a  carpenter's  hammer,  in  a  warm 
summer  noon,  would  fret  him  into  more  than 
midsummer  madness  ;  but  these  single  strokes 
brought  no  such  anguish  to  his  ear  as  did  the 
"  measured  mahce  of  music."  He  affirmed  that 
he  had  been  goaded  to  rush  out  from  the  Opera, 
in  sheer  pain,  seeking  solace  in  street  sounds  ! 

However  disfurnished  may  be  this  interior,  its 
tiny  hall,  its  narrow  stairway,  its  walls — on  which 
the  Lambs  may  have  put  this  very  same  queer 
marbled  paper — all  are  in  the  same  state  as  then, 
when  they  lived  within  and  loved  them.  The 
most  marked  alteration  has  been  in  his  once 
"  spacious  garden  " — around  which  he  challenged 


Footprints  of  Charles  Lamb.  107 


that  professional  jester,  the  obese,  red-nosed 
Theodore  Hook,  to  race  him  for  a  wager.  That 
diminutive  domain  has  dwindled  now  to  an 
exiguous  back  yard,  and  a  soda-water  factory 
is  built  over  its  vines  and  vegetables. 

Here  the  little  household  was  enlarged  and 
enlivened  by  the  presence  of  Emma  Isola,  the 
orphaned  grandchild  of  an  Italian  exile,  who 
taught  his  own  tongue  in  Cambridge,  and  who 
had  been  the  Italian  teacher  of  Gray  and  of 
Wordsworth.  To  her  the  Lambs,  then  visiting 
Cambridge,  took  a  strong  fancy;  Mary  especially 
pouring  out  on  her  the  bounteous  sympathy 
with  which  she  flowed  over  for  young  people, 
and  which  won  from  all  of  them  an  equal  fond- 
ness. They  invited  the  lonely  girl  to  visit  them 
during  her  holidays,  and  finally  they  made  her 
their  adopted  daughter,  and  their  home  her 
own.  Mary  helped  her  with  French,  Charles 
taught  her  Latin,  that  she  might  become  a 
governess.  Lamb  was  always  quick  to  serve 
those  who  were  poorer  than  himself,  and,  giving 
greatly  all  his  life  long,  in  Procter's  words,  he 
always  had  proteges  and  pensioners  on  his 
bounty.     Yet   he  was  curiously  provident,   and 


io8  Footprints  of  Charles  Lamb. 


never  lived  beyond  his  simple  income,  never 
ran  into  debt.  He  could  and  did  practise 
economy  with  himself,  but  he  was  incapable  of 
parsimony  in  his  dealings  with  others. 

These  are  De  Quincey's  words  about  this 
side  of  the  man  :  "  Many  liberal  people  I  have 
known  in  this  world  .  .  .  many  munificent 
people,  but  never  any  one  upon  whom,  for 
bounty,  for  indulgence  and  forgiveness,  for 
charitable  construction  of  doubtful  or  mixed 
actions,  and  for  regal  munificence,  you  might 
have  thrown  yourself  with  so  absolute  a  reliance 
as  upon  this  comparatively  poor  Charles  Lamb." 

But  of  all  this  the  subject  of  this  fervent, 
true  tribute  tells  us  no  word.  He  prattled  in 
print  as  freely  and  as  frankly  as  Montaigne, 
though  with  none  of  the  sentimental  shame- 
lessness  of  Jean  Jacques  Rousseau  ;  and  his 
delightful  egotism  has  made  plain  to  us  his 
foibles  and  his  follies.  Yet,  with  all  the  rest 
of  his  life  in  evidence,  we  know  nothing  from 
Jiim  of 

"That  best  portion  of  a  good  man's  life, 
His  little,  nameless,  unremembered  acts 
Of  kindness  and  of  love." 


Footprints  of  Charles  Lamb.  loq 


They  had  need,  just  then,  of  the  brightness 
of  the  young  girl's  presence,  for  they  were 
saddened — albeit  needlessly  so  for  all  the  com- 
fort he  had  brought  to  them — by  the  death  of 
their  brother  John.  Mary's  illnesses  were  grow- 
ing more  frequent  and  more  prolonged ;  and 
Charles  was  chafing  more  and  more  under  his 
unending  drudgery  at  the  desk.  In  1822  he 
had  already  written  to  Wordsworth  :  "  I  grow 
ominously  tired  of  official  confinement.  Thirty 
years  have  I  served  the  Philistines,  and  my 
neck  is  not  subdued  to  the  yoke.  You  don't 
know  how  wearisome  it  is  to  breathe  the  air  of 
four  pent  walls,  without  relief,  day  after  day, 
all  the  golden  hours  of  the  day  between  ten 
and  four,  without  ease  or  interposition."  And 
once  he  gave  irate  vent  to  a  great  outburst, 
dear  to  all  but  to  the  shop-keeping  soul :  "  Con- 
fusion blast  all  mercantile  transactions,  all  traf- 
fic, exchange  of  commodities,  intercourse  be- 
tween nations,  all  the  consequent  civilization, 
and  wealth,  and  amity,  and  links  of  society,  and 
getting  rid  of  prejudices,  and  getting  a  knowl- 
edge of  the  face  of  the  globe  ;  and  rotting  the 
very  firs  of  the    forest   that    look  so    romantic 


no  Footprints  of  Charles  Lamb. 


alive,  and  die  into  desks!  Vale."  And  again: 
"  Oh,  that  I  were  kicked  out  of  Leadenhall, 
with  every  mark  of  indignity,  and  a  competence 
in  my  fob  !  The  birds  of  the  air  would  not  be 
so  free  as  I  should.  How  I  would  prance  and 
curvet  it,  and  pick  up  cowslips  and  ramble 
about  purposeless  as  an  idiot  !  " 

It  was  in  April,  1825,  that  his  wish  was 
gratified,  and  his  waiting  brought  to  an  end,  in 
this  verj''  Colebrook  cottage.  He  had  nerved 
himself  at  length  to  offer  his  resignation  to  the 
Directors  of  the  East  India  Company,  and 
was  surprised  and  delighted — having  been  kept 
a  few  weeks  in  suspense — by  the  proposal 
"  that  I  should  accept  from  the  house,  which 
I  had  served  so  well,  a  pension  for  life  to 
the  amount  of  two-thirds  of  my  accustomed 
salary — -a  magnificent  offer.  I  do  not  know 
what  I  answered  between  surprise  and  grati- 
tude, but  it  was  understood  that  I  accepted 
their  proposal,  and  I  was  told  that  I  was  free 
from  that  hour  to  leave  their  service.  I  stam- 
mered out  a  bow,  and  at  just  ten  minutes  after 
eight  I  went  home — forever."  To  Words- 
worth   he    wrote,  on    April   6,   1825  :  "  I    came 


Footprints  of  Charles  Lamb.  1 1 1 


home  FOREVER  on  Tuesday  in  last  week.  The 
incomprehensibleness  of  my  condition  over- 
whelmed me  ;  it  was  like  passing  from  life  into 
eternity.  Every  year  to  be  as  long  as  three — 
to  have  three  times  as  much  real  time — time 
that  is  my  own — in  it !  " 

He  compared  his  sensations  to  those  of 
Leigh  Hunt  on  being  released  from  prison. 
Indeed,  the  change  proved  to  be  too  sudden 
and  too  great  for  his  happiness,  and  he  yearned 
for  the  "  pestilential  clerk-faces  "  which  had  so 
long  bored  him :  so  one  day,  soon  after,  he 
went  back  to  the  office,  and  sat  amid  "  the  old 
desk  companions,  with  whom  I  have  had  such 
merry  hours,"  and  tried  to  feel  really  sorry 
that  he  had  left  them  in  the  lurch  !  He  has 
told  us  of  all  his  feelings,  good  and  bad,  at  this 
period,  in  "  The  Superannuated  Man."  He 
could  not  quite  thoroughly  enjoy  his  freedom, 
and  was  put  to  all  sorts  of  devices  to  waste  his 
cherished  time!  He  re-hung  his  Titians,  his 
Da  Vincis,  his  Hogarths,  and  his  other  beloved 
prints.  He  marshalled  his  Chelsea  China  shep- 
herds and  shepherdesses  in  groups  and  singly 
all  about  the  rooms.     He  rearranged  the  ragged 


112  Footprints  of  Charles  Lamb. 


veterans  of  his  Hbrary  ;  not  longing  overmuch 
for  the  good  leather  that  would  comfortably 
clothe  his  shivering  folios.  Few  of  them  were 
lettered  on  the  back,  and  his  reply  to  a  silly 
somebody,  w^ho  asked  how  he  knew  them,  was: 
"  How  does  a  shepherd  know  his  sheep?"  It 
was  his  fantastic  humour  that,  the  better  a 
book  is  the  less  it  demands  from  binding  ! 

Out  of  doors,  he  planted  and  pruned  and 
grafted ;  and  got  into  a  row  with  an  irascible 
old  lady  who  owned  the  next  garden.  He  sat 
under  his  own  vine  and  contemplated  the 
growth  of  vegetable  nature.  He  explored  his 
new  neighbourhood,  hunted  up  ancient  hostel- 
ries,  and  made  comparisons  of  their  sundry  and 
divers  taps.  He  prowled  about  Bartholomew 
Fair,  drinking  in  delight  of  its  penny  puppet- 
shows,  and  its  other  "  celebrated  follies,"  as 
they  had  been  contumeliously  called  by  sedate 
John  Evelyn,  a  visitor  there  nearly  two  cen- 
turies earlier.  He  took  long  walks  into  the 
country,  with  Tom  Hood's  erratic  dog,  Dash, 
who  imposed  outrageously  on  Lamb's  good- 
nature ;  and  went  on  excursions  with  Mary,  far- 
ther   afield — notably    to     Enfield,    where    they 


Footprints  of  Charles  Lamb.  1 1 


made  short  stays  with  a  Mrs.  Leishman,  into 
whose  house  they  finally  removed  in  1827. 

"  I  am  settled  for  life,  I  hope,  at  Enfield.  I 
have  taken  the  prettiest  compacted  house  I 
ever  saw,"  he  wrote.  A'o  health  in  Islington, 
was  his  complaint  to  Tom  Hood ;  and  yet, 
"  'twas  with  some  pains  that  we  were  evulsed 
from  Colebrook.  You  may  find  some  of  our 
flesh  sticking  to  the  door-posts.  To  change 
habitations  is  to  die  to  them,  and  in  my  time 
I  have  died  seven  deaths."'  He  hoped  for 
benefit  to  Mary  from  the  quiet,  and  to  himself 
from  the  change,  and  yet  he  looked  forward  to 
casual  trips  to  town,  mainly  "  to  breathe  the 
frcsJicr  air  of  the  metropolis." 

In  those  days  they  went  to  Enfield  by  coach 
twice  a  week  or  so,  from  one  or  another  of  the 
old  inns,  left  standing  to-day  in  Aldgate  or 
Bishopsgate.  No  coaches  run  now,  but  it  is  a 
pleasant  walk,  up  through  the  long  northern 
suburb,  still  showing,  spite  of  its  being  so  citi- 
fied, traces  of  its  old-time  gentility  in  the 
square,  stately,  stolid  brick  mansions,  the  rural 
homes  of  rich  city  merchants  a  century  since. 
We    pass  the   High    Cross  at  Tottenham,    and 


114  Footprints  of  Charles  Lamb. 


beside  it  the  Sivan  Lin,  descendant  of  that 
Swan  in  front  of  which,  within  sight  of  their 
beloved  Lea,  Anceps  and  Piscator  rested  "  in  a 
sweet,  shady  arbour  which  nature  herself  has 
woven  with  her  own  fine  fingers:"  but  the 
stream  is  polluted  now,  and  the  arbour  has 
gone,  and  Izaak  Walton  would  not  care  for  the 
new  Sivan.  So  we  pass  by  Bruce  Castle,  thus 
named  because  it  was  owned  by  Robert  Bruce, 
father  of  the  Scotch  king — now  a  boys'  school 
— and  come  into  that  bit  of  road  famous  for 
John  Gilpin's  ride,  and  so  on  into  Edmonton. 
Here  we  turn  from  the  highway — by  which  the 
stage-coaches  kept  on  northward  to  Ware  and 
Hatfield — and  going  three  miles  farther,  along 
the  cross  road,  we  reach  Enfield. 

By  rail  it  is  ten  miles  from  Liverpool  Street 
Station,  and  we  whisk  there  in  forty  minutes 
by  many  trains  each  day  ;  underground,  behind  I 
houses,  over  their  roofs  ;  along  by  Bethnal 
Green  and  Hackney  Downs  and  London  Fields 
— where  now  can  be  seen  no  green  nor  downs 
nor  any  fields — past  Silver  Street  and  Seven 
Sisters  and  White  Hart  Lane,  and  man\'  such 
prettily  named  places;  and   last  of  all  through 


Footprints  of  Charles  Lamb.  1 1 


a  stretch  of  real  country  into  the  dapper  little 
station  of  Enfield. 

"  Enfield  Chase "  was  a  favourite  hunting- 
ground  of  royalty  until  it  was  divided  into  par- 
cels and  sold  after  the  execution  of  Charles  I. 
Some  of  the  old  hunting-lodges  still  stand  in 
gardens,  one  of  them  once  tenanted  by  William 
Pitt.  I  have  talked  with  aged  men  in  the  vil- 
lage who  have  seen,  when  they  were  boys,  the 
"King's  red  deer"  come  into  "The  Chase" 
to  drink  from  the  New  River:  which  winds 
through  the  land  here,  its  waters  drawn  from 
the  springs  of  Amwell  and  Chadwell,  and  from 
slopes  with  sunshine  on  them,  and  led  later 
underground  through  pipes  to  supply  London 
town.  This  nciv  river  was  cut  and  engineered 
by  Mr.  Hugh  Myddelton,  citizen  and  goldsmith, 
who,  "  with  his  choice  men  of  art  and  painful 
labourers  set  roundly  to  this  business,"  in  the 
year  of  grace  i6og,  and  was  knighted  by  the 
first  James  for  his  enterprise  and  success  in 
his  stupendous  work.  Tom  Hood  got  out 
"Walton  Redivivus,  a  New  River  Eclogue," 
and  Lamb  wrote  a  preface  for  it,  in  which  he 
referred    to    his    new    home    having    the    same 


ii6  Footprints  of  Charles  Lamb. 


neighbour  as  his  cottage  at  Colebrook.  Doubt- 
less he  recalled,  too,  his  out-of-town  bathing- 
excursions  with  the  other  boys  at  Christ's,  and 
how  they  would  wanton  like  young  dace  in  this 
same  stream.  "  My  old  New  River  has  pre- 
sented no  extraordinary  novelties  lately.  But 
there  Hope  sits,  day  after  day,  speculating  on 
traditionary  gudgeons.  I  think  she  hath  taken 
the  fisheries.  I  now  know  the  reason  why  our 
forefathers  were  denominated  the  East  and 
West  Angles." 

We  pass  the  town's  old  inns,  with  steep- 
sloping  roofs,  and  many  a  stately  mansion  set  in 
great  gardens ;  among  them  the  ancient  manor- 
house,  renovated  b}'  Edward  VI.  for  the  resi- 
dence of  his  sister,  the  Princess  Elizabeth. 
From  here  she  wrote  letters  which  you  may  see 
in  the  British  Museum  ;  and  in  the  Bodleian  at 
Oxford  is  the  MS.  translation,  in  her  own  hand, 
of  an  Italian  sermon  preached  here  by  Occhini. 
This  building— now  The  Palace  School — con- 
tains one  of  her  rooms,  oak-panelled  and  richly 
ceilinged  ;  and  in  the  grounds  is  a  noble  cedar 
of  Lebanon,  planted  in  1670.  We  look  up  at 
the  swinging  signs  of  the  Risni^^  Si///  and  the 


Footprints  of  Charles  Lamb.  117 


Crown  and  Horseshoes,  past  all  of  which 
Lamb  often  went,  and,  doubtless,  too  often 
did  not  get  past  without  going  in.  It  tickled 
him  to  urge  truly  proper  people  to  tipple 
with  him  in  these  two  taverns;  and  even 
lady-like  Miss  Kelly — the  actress  with  the 
"  divine,  plain  face  " — and  the  austere  Words- 
worth were  enticed  to  enter,  and  persuaded 
to  have  "  a  pull  at  the  pewter  !  " 

And  so,  through  a  leafy  lane  bordered  by 
stately  elms,  with  cosey  cottages  on  either 
hand,  across  a  cheerful  green,  alongside  the 
rippling  stream,  we  reach  the  "  Manse,"  as 
Lamb's  home  was  called  for  many  years — a 
name  it  has  only  lately  lost,  when  it  was  newly 
stuccoed  and  painted.  It  has  been  rechristened 
"The  Poplars,"  from  the  four  tall  trees  of 
that  species  which  rear  themselves  in  its  front 
garden.  In  the  garden  behind,  the  old  yew 
and  the  bent  apple-trees,  and  beyond  the  pleas- 
ant fields  stretching  away,  are  all  as  they  were 
when  he  looked  through  and  over  them  to  the 
Epping  Hills.  The  house  has  been  enlarged 
and  changes  have  been  made  inside,  and  all  is 
hideously  and  shamelessly  "  smart." 


ii8  Footprints  of  Charles  Lamb. 


Nothing  in  this  interior  speaks  to  us  of  its 
old  tenants.  They  were  seen,  on  their  coming 
to  take  the  house,  by  a  schoolboy  next  door, 
who  has  given  this  pleasing  description  of 
them:  "Leaning  idly  out  of  a  window,  I  saw 
a  group  of  three  issuing  from  the  '  gambogy- 
looking  cottage'  close  at  hand — a  slim,  middle- 
aged  man  in  quaint,  uncontemporary  habili- 
ments, a  rather  shapeless  bundle  of  an  old 
lady,  in  a  bonnet  like  a  mob-cap,  and  a  young 
girl;  while  before  them  bounded  a  riotous  dog 
[Hood's  immortal  'Dash'],  holding  a  board, 
with  '  This  House  To  Let '  on  it,  in  his  jaws. 
Lamb  was  on  his  way  back  to  the  house- 
agent's,  and  that  was  his  fashion  of  announc- 
ing that  he  had  taken  the  premises." 

In  the  summer  of  1829,  the  family  of  three 
left  this  home,  the  care  of  which  was  wearing 
too  heavily  on  Mar}\  "  We  have  taken  a  fare- 
well of  the  pompous,  troublesome  trifle  called 
housekeeping,  and  are  settled  down  into  poor 
boarders  and  lodgers,  at  next  door,  with  an  old 
couple,  the  Baucis  and   Baucida  of  dull  Enfield. 

.  .  Our  providers  are  an  honest  pair, 
Dame  Westwood   and   her   husband  ;  he,  when 


Footprints  of  Charles  Lamb.  1 19 


the  light  of  prosperity  shined  on  them,  a  mod- 
erately thriving  haberdasher  within  Bow  Bells, 
retired  since  with  something  under  a  compe- 
tence .  .  .  and  has  o)ic  ajuxdotc,  upon  which, 
and  about  £\0  a  year,  he  seems  to  have  retired 
in  green  old  age."  It  was  "  forty-two  inches 
nearer  town,"  Lamb  wrote,  and  it  still  is 
there,  next  door  to  their  first  Enfield  home, 
as  you  see  it  in  our  cut:  a  comfortable  cottage 
set  back  from  the  road,  vines  clambering  over 
its  small  entrance-porch  and  hiding  all  the 
walls.  In  its  little  back  sitting-room  were 
written  the  "  Last  Essays  of  Elia."  In  this 
house  he  remained  for  almost  four  years,  and 
in  1833  he  made  his  last  remove — except  the 
final  one  we  all  must  make — to  Edmonton. 


VI. 


These  years  at  Enfield  were  not  happy  years. 
They  were  both  getting  old  ;  Mary's  malady  was 
growing  on  her,  taking  her  more  frequently 
from  JiODie ;  and  even  the  visits  of  their  child, 
Emma  Isola — she  was  now  a  governess — miti- 
gated his  loneliness  but  slightly.  Plis  removal 
to  the  country  had  left  his  friends  a  long  way 
behind,  and,  for  all  his  urging,  they  could  not 
come  often  so  far  afield  for  informal  calls. 
"We  see  scarce  anybody,"  he  laments.  Haz- 
litt  and  Hood  and  Hunt  came  occasionally; 
faithful  Martin  Burney  fetched  forth  his  new- 
est whim  for  their  amusement ;  and  loyal 
Crabb  Robinson  often  walked  out  to  take 
tea  or  to  play  whist,  or  for  a  stroll  in  the 
fields  with  Charles.  Once,  as  he  has  recorded 
in  his  "  Diary,"  he  brought  the  mighty  Wal- 
ter Savage  Landor  for  a  call :  "  We  had 
scarcely  an  hour  to  chat  with  them,  but  it 
was  enough  to  make  both  Landor  and  Worsley 


Footprints  of  Charles  Lamb.  121 


express  themselves  delighted  with  the  person 
of  Mary  Lamb,  and  pleased  with  the  conversa- 
tion of  Charles  Lamb ;  though  I  thought  him 
by  no  means  at  his  ease,  and  Miss  Lamb  was 
quite  silent.  Nothing  in  the  conversation  recol- 
lectable.  Lamb  gave  Landor  White's  '  Fal- 
staff's  Letters.'  Emma  Isola  just  showed  her- 
self. Landor  was  pleased  with  her,  and  has 
since  written  verses  on  her."  Only  this  once 
did  Lamb  and  Landor  come  face  to  face. 

Lamb  had  always  hated  the  country.  "  Let 
not  the  lying  poets  be  believed,  who  entice 
men  from  the  cheerful  streets,"  he  querulously 
complains ;  and  he  asks,  "  What  have  I  gained 
by  health  ?  Intolerable  dulness.  What  by 
early  hours  and  moderate  meals?  A  total 
blank.  .  .  .  Let  no  native  Londoner  im- 
agine that  health  and  rest,  innocent  occu- 
pation, interchange  of  converse  sweet,  and 
recreative  study,  can  make  the  country  any- 
thing better  than  altogether  odious  and  detest- 
able. A  garden  was  the  primitive  prison,  till 
man,  with  Promethean  felicity  and  boldness, 
luckily  sinned  himself  out  of  it." 

He  was  unable  to  read  or  write  to  any  ex- 


122  Footprints  of  Charles  Lamb. 


tent  in  hot  weather ;  "  what  I  can  do,  and  do 
over-do,  is  to  walk;  but  deadly  long  are  the 
days,  these  summer  all-day  days,  with  but 
a  half-hour's  candle-light,  and  no  firelight." 
Sometimes,  of  a  "  genial  hot  day,"  he  would 
do  his  twenty  miles  and  over.  Once  he  took 
charge  of  a  Httle  school  during  the  master's 
short  absence ;  and  his  first  exercise  of  author- 
ity was  to  give  the  boys  a  holiday  !  But 
nothing  abated  his  boredom,  and  even  in  his 
bed  he  repined:  "In  dreams  I  am  in  Fleet 
Street,  but  I  wake  and  cry  to  sleep  again." 
And  when  he  went  to  town,  and  sought  in 
Fleet  Street  fresh  sights  and  fresher  air,  he 
found  no  content  :  "  The  streets,  the  shops, 
are  left,  but  all  old  friends  are  gone.  .  .  . 
Home  have  I  none,  and  not  a  sympathizing 
house  to  turn  to  in  the  great  city." 

He  took  lodgings  for  a  while  at  No.  24 
Southampton  Buildings,  within  sight  of  his 
former  quarters  at  No.  34  of  the  same  street 
— a  house  in  which  Hazlitt  frequently  had 
put  up,  not  far  from  the  house  famed  for  his 
"  ancillary  affection  !  "  The  numbers  remain 
unchanged  ;  and  you  may  look  at  the  queer  old 


NO.    34    SOUTHAMPTON    BUILDINGS. 


Footprints  of  Charles  Lamb.  123 


stuccoed  front  on  any  day  you  choose  to  turn 
out  from  Chancery  Lane.  The  house  has  a 
strange,  sloping  roof  of  tiles,  and  altogether  it 
is  quite  unHke  any  of  its  neighbours. 

But  this  impermanent  residence  in  town 
brought  no  real  relief,  for  he  found  that  the 
bodies  he  cared  for  were  in  graves  or  dis- 
persed. He  sought  solace  in  work,  and  made 
extracts  for  Hone's  Table  Book  from  among 
the  two  thousand  old  plays  left  by  Garrick  to 
the  British  Museum.  Hone  had  been  grateful 
to  Lamb  for  having  contributed  already  to  his 
Every  Day  Book ;  and  had  dedicated  the  issue 
for  1826  to  him  and  to  Mary.  In  doing  so, 
he  published  his  gratitude,  most  distastefully  to 
them,  saying  in  his  preface  that  he  could  not 
forget  "your  and  Miss  Lamb's  sympathy  and 
kindness  when  glooms  outmastered  me ;  and 
that  your  pen  spontaneously  sparkled  in  the 
book  when  my  mind  was  in  clouds  and  darkness. 
These  '  trifles,'  as  each  of  you  would  call  them, 
are  benefits  scored  upon  my  heart." 

Forgiving  this  fulsome  gush.  Lamb  set  his 
pen  to  sparkling  again  in  the  following  year, 
and  found  relief  in  it.     "  It  is  a  sort  of  office- 


124  Footprints  of  Charles  Lamb. 


work  to  me — hours  ten  to  four,  the  same.  It 
does  me  good."  The  reading-room  wherein  he 
worked  is  now  the  print-room,  a  venerable  and 
musty  chamber,  famous  in  those  days  for  its 
fine  specimens  of  the  Pulex  literarius,  or  Mu- 
seum flea  ;  and  doubtless  infested,  too — for 
Lamb's  irritation,  as  for  Carlyle's,  since  the 
latter  has  left  it  on  record — by  that  reader, 
still  startling  us  there  to-day,  who  blows  his 
nose  "  like  a  Chaldean  trumpet  in  the  new 
moon  ; "  and  by  that  other,  who  slumbers 
peacefully  with  his  head  in  a  ponderous  tome, 
and  wakes  suddenly,  snorting. 

The  assistant-librarian  of  the  Museum  at  that 
time  was  the  Reverend  Mr.  Cary — "  the  Dante 
man  " — a  friend  of  the  Lambs  of  recent  years  ; 
and  Charles  found  congenial  companionship  at 
his  table,  where  he  was  frequently  invited  to 
dine.  Near  the  Museum,  in  Hart  Street,  F.  S. 
Cary,  the  son  of  the  librarian,  had  his  studio  ; 
and  there  Charles  would  v/ander,  on  Thursdays, 
during  the  summer  of  1834,  and  sit  for  his 
portrait,  with  Mary.  He  is  portrayed  seated 
in  a  chair,  and  Mary  stands  behind  him  ;  the 
ficrures    full    length     and     half-life    size.      This 


Footprints  of  Charles  Lamb.  125 


painting  was  never  completed,  and  from  it  the 
artist  made  a  copy  of  Charles  alone,  after 
death.  Of  this,  Crabb  Robinson  said,  a  few 
years  later:  "In  no  one  respect  a  likeness; 
thoroughly  bad ;  complexion,  figure,  expres- 
sion unlike.  But  for  '  Elia  '  on  a  paper,  I 
should  not  have  thought  it  possible  that  it 
could  have  been  meant  for  Charles  Lamb." 
Another  portrait  of  him  had  been  painted  in 
1805  by  William  Hazlitt ;  his  last  work  with 
the  brush,  we  are  told  by  his  grandson.  This 
figure,  in  the  costume  of  a  Venetian  senator, 
is  well  known  in  its  engravings,  and  is  con- 
sidered an  interesting  presentation  of  the  man. 
But,  beyond  the  fine  and  forcible  poise  of 
the  head — the  noble  head  which  resembled  that 
of  Bacon,  said  Leigh  Hunt,  except  that  it  had 
less  worldly  vigour  and  more  sensibility — this  is 
to  me  an  unpleasing  picture.  It  robs  Lamb  of 
just  that  sensibility,  and  transforms  him  into  a 
burly,  truculent,  ill-conditioned  creature !  He 
was  thirty  years  old  at  the  time  this  was  painted. 
When  he  was  twenty-three,  an  admirable  draw- 
ing in  chalk  had  been  made  by  Hancock;  a 
profile  likeness,  in  which   the  superb  sweep  of 


126  Footprints  of  Charles  Lamb. 


the  cranial  arch  and  the  subtle  sweet  lines 
about  the  mouth  are  most  noticeable.  This, 
the  first  portrait  known  of  him,  was  engraved 
on  steel  for  Cottle's  •'  Early  Recollections  of 
Coleridge." 

A  striking  piece  of  portraiture  of  his  mature 
manhood  has  been  found  within  a  few  years. 
It  is  a  water-colour  sketch  by  Mr.  Joseph, 
A.  R.  A.,  and  had  been  inserted,  along  with 
many  other  portraits,  in  a  copy  of  Byron's 
"  English  Bards  and  Scotch  Reviewers."  This 
volume  had  been  thus  enlarged,  in  1819,  by  Mr. 
William  Evans,  Lamb's  desk-companion  in  the 
East  India  House,  and  he  had  doubtless  in- 
duced Lamb  to  sit  for  this  portrait  with  this 
intent.  Another  admirable  likeness  was  painted 
in  oil,  in  1827,  by  Henry  Meyer,  and  this  was 
engraved  for  the  quarto  edition  of  Leigh 
Hunt's  "  Lord  Byron  and  his  Contemporaries," 
published  by  Colburn,  in  1828. 

The  frontispiece  of  our  volume  is  a  repro- 
duction of  the  portrait  first  engraved  for  Tal- 
fourd's  "  Letters,"  published  in  1837.  It  is 
known  as  the  Wageman  portrait,  engraved  by 
Finden,  and    is    perhaps   the  most    noted    and 


/^ 


THE    MACLISE    PORTRAIT. 


Footprints  of  Charles  Lamb.  127 


the  most  attractive  of  any  likeness  we  have. 
Our  Maclise  portrait  is  made  from  an  etching 
done  by  Daniel  Maclise,  R.  A.,  for  Frasers 
Magazine  ;  in  which  pages  it  appeared,  as  one 
of  "  A  Gallery  of  Illustrious  Literary  Charac- 
ters," published  from  the  year  1830  to  1838. 
Of  all  the  portraits  of  Lamb,  however,  it  was 
always  held  by  those  who  had  seen  him  that 
Brook  Pulham's  etching  on  copper  was  the 
most  life-like  in  every  way  ever  done.  We  are 
fortunate  in  having  so  many  portraits,  some  of 
them  so  good ;  for  Lamb  never  liked  to  sit, 
regarding  the  desire  to  pose  for  a  picture  as 
an  avowal  of  personal  vanity. 

Of  serious  literary  work,  during  this  period. 
Lamb  did  but  little ;  his  main  pen  product 
being  his  letters  to  his  many  absent  friends, 
which  give  us  such  valuable  and  characteristic 
glimpses  into  the  man's  lovable  nature.  He 
wrote  a  series  of  short  essays,  with  the  title 
"  Popular  Fallacies,"  for  the  New  Monthly  Mag- 
azine in  1828;  and  a  little  prose  miscellany — 
chat  and  souvenirs  of  the  Royal  Academy — 
called  ''  Peter's  Net,"  for  the  Englishman  s 
Magazine  in   1831.     The   year   before,  Moxon 


128  Footprints  of  Charles  Lamb. 


had  pubHshed  a  small  volume  of  small  poems 
by  Lamb — "Album  Verses  " — concerning  which 
a  curious  secret  has  only  lately  come  to  light. 
The  critics  found  little  to  praise  in  these  verses 
— and  with  good  reason — and  a  review  was  sent 
to  the  Englishman  s  Magazine,  with  a  line  to 
Moxon  from  Lamb:  "I  have  ingeniously  con- 
trived to  review  myself.  Tell  me  if  this  will 
do."  He  did  not  praise  or  puff  his  own  work, 
let  me  hasten  to  say  ;  but  his  paper  is  rather  a 
protest  against  the  errors  and  carelessness  of 
those  same  "  indolent  reviewers."  Still,  it  is 
a  clear  case  of  surreptitious  self-reviewing,  and 
of  it  we  may  say,  in  the  words  of  the  coy 
Quakeress — not  Lamb's  Islington  Quakeress — 
when  she  reluctantly  consented  to  let  her 
ardent  wooer  enforce  his  threat  to  kiss  her — 
"it  must  not  be  made  a  practice  of." 

In  1833  appeared  the  "Last  Essays  of  Elia," 
collected  in  one  volume,  from  the  London,  the 
EnglisJunans,  and  the  Neiv  MontJily  Magazines, 
and  the  Athcnczum.  This  work  closed  his  lit- 
erary life,  not  long  before  the  closing  of  his 
bodily  life. 

For  the  scene   darkens   swiftly  now.     "  Mary 


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Footprints  of  Charles  Lamb.  129 


is  ill  again.  Ker  illnesses  encroach  yearly. 
The  last  was  three  months,  followed  by  two  of 
depression  most  dreadful.  I  look  back  upon 
her  earlier  attacks  with  longing.  Nice  little 
durations  of  six  weeks  or  so,  followed  by  com- 
plete restoration,  shocking  as  they  were  to  me, 
then.  In  short,  half  her  life  is  dead  to  me,  and 
the  other  half  is  made  anxious  with  fears  and 
lookings-forward  to  the  next  shock."  This  was 
in  May,  1833,  when  he  decided  to  remove  to 
Edmonton  :  "  With  such  prospects  it  seemed 
to  me  necessary  that  she  should  no  longer  live 
with  me,  and  be  fluttered  with  continual  re- 
movals ;  so  I  am  come  to  live  with  her  at  a  Mr. 
Walden's  and  his  wife,  who  take  in  patients, 
and  have  arranged  to  lodge  and  board  us  only. " 
To  lay  a  little  more  load  on  him,  he  lost 
Emma  Isola,  one  month  later,  in  July,  1833,  by 
her  marriage  with  Edward  Moxon :  their  be- 
trothal having  been  entered  into  "  with  my  per- 
fect approval  and  more  than  concurrence,"  he 
writes.  In  the  same  letter  he  says,  as  unsel- 
fishly as  always :  "  I  am  about  to  lose  my  only 
walk  companion,  whose  mirthful  spirits  were 
the  youth  of  our  house."  He  gave  her,  for  a 
9 


1^0  Footprints  of  Charles  Lamb. 


marriage  gift,  his  most  cherished  possession, 
a  portrait  of  John  Milton.  Mary's  reason  was 
too  clouded,  at  the  time,  to  take  interest  in  this 
affair,  or  even  to  understand  it ;  but  on  the  day 
of  the  wedding,  being  at  table  with  them  all, 
Mrs.  Walden  proposed  the  health  of  Mr.  and 
Mrs.  Moxon.  The  utterance  of  the  unwonted 
name  restored  Mary  to  her  composedness  of 
mind,  as  if  by  an  electrical  stroke  ;  she  wrote 
afterward  to  the  young  couple  :  "  I  never  felt 
so  calm  and  quiet  after  a  similar  illness  as  I  do 
now.  I  feel  as  if  all  tears  were  wiped  from  my 
eyes,  and  all  care  from  my  heart." 

Amid  all  these  added  adversities,  he  tried, 
with  his  cheerful  and  cheering  courage,  to 
make  the  best  of  it  all.  He  found  compensa- 
tion in  that  they  were  "emancipated  from  the 
Westwoods,"  and  were  settled  "  three  or  four 
miles  nearer  the  great  city,  coaches  half-price 
less,  and  going  always,  of  which  I  will  avail 
myself.  I  have  few  friends  left  there,  but  one 
or  two  most  beloved.  But  London  streets 
and  faces  cheer  me  inexpressibly,  though  not 
one  known  of  the  latter  were  remaining." 
And    yet   he   struggled  to  town    still  more    in- 


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THE    WAl.DEM    HOLSE    AT    EDMOaNTON. 


Footprints  of  Charles  Lamb.  131 


frequently,  and  then  only  to  find  that,  "  with 
all  my  native  hankering  after  it,  it  is  not  what 
it  was.  .  ,  .  The  streets  and  shops  enter- 
taining as  ever,  else  I  feel  as  in  a  desert, 
and  get  me  home  to  my  care."  It  is  a  touch- 
ing sight,  as  we  may  picture  it,  that  of  the 
lonely  man,  with  worn  face  and  wistful  eyes, 
wandering  forlornly  up  and  down  his  once 
familiar  streets,  seeing  so  seldom  any  of  the 
once  familiar  faces.  One  day  he  met  Mrs. 
Shelley  in  the  Strand,  and  was — she  wrote  to 
Leigh  Hunt— very  entertaining  and  amiable, 
though  a  little  deaf.  He  asked  her  if  they 
made  puns  in  Italy,  and  told  her  that  Captain 
Burney  once  made  a  pun  in  Otaheite,  the  first 
that  was  ever  made  in  that  country.  The 
natives  could  not  make  out  what  he  meant ; 
but  all  at  once  they  discovered  the  pun,  and 
danced  round  him  in  transports  of  joy! 

During  these  lamentable  days  he  saw  his 
sister  but  seldom  :  "  Alas !  I  too  often  hear 
her!  .  .  .  Her  rambling  chat  is  better  to  me 
than  the  sense  and  sanity  of  this  world."  That 
is  to  me  the  most  tender  and  touching  utterance 
in  all  the  letters  since  letters  were  invented. 


i}2  Footprints  of  Charles  Lamb. 


At  times,  when  her  mind  was  not  too  turbid, 
she  played  piquet  with  him,  and  they  talked  of 
death  ;  which  they  did  not  fear,  nor  yet  wish 
for.  Neither  had  been  ever  quite  able  to  say 
with  Sir  Thomas  Browne,  in  Lamb's  favourite 
"  Religio  Medici  "  :  "I  thank  God  I  have  not 
those  strait  ligaments,  or  narrow  obligations  to 
the  world,  as  to  dote  on  life,  or  be  convulsed  and 
tremble  at  the  name  of  death."  Both  wished 
that  Mary  should  go  first.  Mrs.  Cowden 
Clarke  has  told  us  how  he  said  abruptly,  one 
day- — his  blunt  words  covering  his  intense  ten- 
derness— "  You  must  die  first,  Mary."  And 
she  replied,  with  her  little  quiet  nod  and 
kindly  smile  :  "  Yes,  I  must  die  first,  Charles!  " 

Death  was  much  in  their  thoughts  during 
these  days.  Hazlitt  had  died  in  1830,  Lamb 
being  with  him  at  the  last  ;  and  in  July,  1834, 
Coleridge  ended,  after  long  suffering,  a  life  of 
"  blighted  utility,"  as  he  himself  truly  put  it. 
The  passing  away  of  this  dearest  of  the  old 
familiar  faces  profoundly  affected  Lamb.  '*  His 
great  and  dear  spirit  haunts  me.  I  cannot 
think  a  thought,  I  cannot  make  a  criticism  on 
men   or   books,  without   an    ineffectual   turning 


Footprints  of  Charles  Lamb. 


':>:> 


and  reference  to  him."  Nor  did  he  linger  long 
alone.  One  day,  in  the  winter  of  that  year, 
taking  his  customary  walk,  he  stumbled,  fell, 
and  bruised  his  face.  The  wound  did  not  seem 
serious,  until  erysipelas  suddenly  set  in,  and 
rapidly  drained  him  of  his  insufficient  vitality. 
So,  on  the  27th  of  December,  1834,  the  Fes- 
tival of  St.  John  and  the  Eve  of  the  Inno- 
cents, sank  to  sleep  forever,  in  the  fine  words 
of  Archbishop  Leighton,  "  this  sweet  diffu- 
sive bountiful  soul,  desiring  only  to  do  good." 
He  was  happy  in  not  living,  as  he  had  said 
long  before,  "  after  all  the  strength  and  beauty 
of  existence  is  gone,  when  all  the  '  life  of  life 
is  fled,'  as  poor  Burns  expresses  it." 

It  was  a  peaceful  and  painless  ending,  yet 
infinitely  pitiful  in  its  loneliness  for  one  so 
essentially  social  in  his  life ;  his  sister's  mind 
being  too  clouded  to  comprehend  what  was 
passing,  and  his  only  two  friends  who  happened 
to  be  within  reach — Talfourd  and  Crabb  Rob- 
inson— arriving  too  late  for  his  recognition. 
They  heard  him  murmuring,  with  his  faint 
voice,  the  names  of  his  dear  old  companions. 
Only   a   few  days    before    he    had   shown    to  a 


1^4  Footprints  of  Charles  Lamb. 


friend  the  mourning-ring  left  him  by  Cole- 
ridge, crying  out,  as  he  was  wont  to  do, 
"Coleridge  is  dead."  And  it  had  been  but 
two  weeks  since,  when,  during  a  walk,  he 
had  pointed  out  to  his  sister  the  spot  in 
the  churchyard  where  he  would  like  to  lie. 

They  laid  him  there,  and  she  loved  to  walk 
to  the  grave  of  an  evening,  so  long  as  she 
stayed  in  Edmonton.  Indeed,  she  was  with 
difficulty  induced  to  go  away  for  short  visits 
to  the  Moxons  and  other  friends.  She  was 
still  at  the  Waldens  in  July,  1836,  for  an  in- 
denture has  been  shown  to  me  lately,  of  that 
date  and  of  that  place,  by  which  she  disposes 
of  the  copyright  of  the  "  Tales  from  Shake- 
spear  "  and  of  "  Mrs.  Leicester's  School." 
This  document  was  witnessed  by  Edward 
Moxon  and  Frederick  Waldeii.  Her  signature 
to  it  is  in  distinct  and  unshaken  characters,  and 
her  middle  name  is  written  without  the  final  e, 
thus,  curiously  enough,  spelling  it  Ann  ;  for  it 
was  always  elsewhere  and  by  every  one  spelled 
Anne. 

Later,  her  lucid  intervals  becoming  less  fre- 
quent and  less  prolonged,  and  her  malady  grow- 


Footprints  of  Charles  Lamb.  135 

ing  so  nearly  chronic  that  there  was  only  "  a 
twilight  of  consciousness  in  her,"  she  was  kept 
under  care  and  restraint  in  St.  John's  Wood 
until  her  death,  thirteen  years  after  his.  She 
rests  by  his  side,  in  the  same  grave,  as  they 
both  wished.  His  pension  had  been,  with  rare 
generosity,  continued  to  her  by  the  East  India 
Company,  and,  in  addition,  she  enjoyed  the  in- 
come of  his  small  savings  (i^2,ooo)  during  her 
life ;  at  her  death  it  went  to  Emma  Isola 
Moxon.  This  was  the  sum  total  of  coin  which 
he  had  gathered  together ;  his  real  riches  were 
lavishly  dispensed  during  his  life,  and  are 
hoarded  now  by  all  of  us  who  love  his  memory. 
We  walk  from  Enfield  by  the  same  path 
across  the  fields  through  which  Lamb  escorted 
Wordsworth  and  his  other  visitors  to  the  Bell 
at  Edmonton,  there  to  take  a  parting  glass  with 
them,  before  the  return  coach  to  town  should 
come  along.  That  famous  inn  is  no  longer  as 
it  was  in  his  day,  even  then  still  in  the  same 
state  as  it  was  when  Cowper  laughed  all  night 
at  the  diverting  history  of  -John  Gilpin,  just 
heard  from  Lady  Austen,  and  said  that  he 
"  must    needs    turn    it    into   a   ballad   when    he 


136  Footprints  of  Charles  Lamb. 


got  up,"  to  relieve  his  reaction  of  melancholy. 
The  balcony  from  which  the  thrifty  wife 
gazed  on  Johnny's  mad  career  is  gone,  the 
very  walls  are  levelled,  a  vilely  vulgar  gin- 
palace  rises  in  their  place,  and  the  ancient 
sign,  bearing  the  legend,  The  Bell  and  John 
Gilpin's  Ride,  is  now  replaced  by  a  great  ag- 
gressive gilt  emblem. 

From  here  we  turn,  following  Lamb's  last 
footsteps,  perchance  none  too  steady,  along  the 
London  Road,  past  the  old  wooden  taverns, 
steep-roofed  and  dormer-windowed,  set  well 
back  from  the  highway,  and  on  the  green  in 
front  a  mighty  horse-trough — relic  of  ancient 
coaching  conveniences.  The  Golden  Fleece  and 
the  Horse  and  Groom  are  all  unchanged  ; 
in  his  odd  irony  the  modern  builder  has  left 
them  untouched,  because  they  have  no  his- 
toric memories  !  Then  we  wind  around  under 
the  railway  arch,  and  so  through  dull,  strag- 
gling Church  Street ;  passing  the  little  shop 
in  which — then  a  surgery — John  Keats  served 
his  apprenticeship,  and  wrote  his  "  Juvenile 
Poems ;  "  and  by  the  one-storied  Charity 
School,    "A    structure    of    Hope,    Founded    in 


aiiiiiiiiiiiiiihiiiiiiiiiiiihiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiJi 


Footprints  of  Charles  Lamb.  137 


Faith,  on  the  basis  of  Charity,  1784,"  as 
the  legend  reads  over  the  head  of  the  queer 
little  female  figure  in  the  niche.  Its  mistress, 
drawn  by  Lamb's  cheerj'  voice  as  he  came 
out,  used  to  run  to  her  window  to  look  at 
the  "  spare,  middle-sized  man  in  pantaloons," 
as  she  described  him. 

For  Bay  Cottage — so  called  in  his  day,  now 
well  re-named  Lamb's  Cottage,  next  to  the 
rampant  lions  on  the  gate-posts  of  Lion  House 
— stands  nearly  opposite  the  small  school  ;  and 
it  was  through  this  long,  narrow  strip  of  front 
garden,  cut  by  a  gravelled  footpath,  and  railed 
in  by  iron  palings,  that  Charles  Lamb  walked 
for  the  last  time,  and  was  carried  to  his  final 
resting-place.  At  its  farther  end  squats  the 
small  cottage,  darkened  and  made  more  diminu- 
tive by  the  projecting  houses  on  both  sides. 
On  the  left  of  the  hall — large  by  contrast — is 
their  snug  sitting-room,  not  more  than  twelve 
feet  square,  low-ceilinged,  deep-windowed,  with 
a  great  beam  above.  Mounting  by  a  narrow, 
winding,  tiny  staircase,  with  its  Queen  Anne 
balustrade — under  which  partly  lies  the  dingy 
dining-room — we    find     ourselves    in    his    front 


138  Footprints  of  Charles  Lamb. 


bedroom,  his  death-room,  with  one  window 
only,  as  in  the  sitting-room  beneath.  Mary's 
large  bedroom  is  behind,  with  two  good  win- 
dows, looking  out  on  the  long  strip  of  back 
garden,  wherein  are  aged  trees  and  young  vege- 
tables. Nothing  within  these  walls  has  suf- 
fered any  change. 

It  is  but  two  minutes'  walk  to  the  great,  deso- 
late graveyard,  encircling  all  about  the  ancient 
church ;  whose  square,  squat,  battlemented 
tower  shows  its  mellow  tints  through  dark 
masses  of  ivy.  Service  was  going  on  when  I 
went  for  the  first  time  to  this  spot,  a  few  years 
since,  and  I  waited  until  the  officiating  clergy- 
man had  finished  his  functions,  that  I  might 
learn  from  him  the  location  of  the  grave  I  had 
come  so  far  to  see.  He  could  not  tell  me  !  He 
had  heard  that  Charles  Lamb  was  buried  in  his 
churchyard,  but  he  had  never  seen  the  grave, 
nor  had  he  been  unduly  inquisitive  about  it. 
After  we  had  found  it,  a  crippled  impostor, 
lounging  on  the  lookout  for  stray  pence, 
scrambled  up  with  affectation  of  mute  sym- 
pathy, and  swarmed  down  with  scissors  on 
the  long  grass   about    the  small  mound.     That 


Footprints  of  Charles  Lamb.  139 


parson's  ignorance,  the  obscurity  and  desola- 
tion of  the  grave,  the  shocking  structure  of 
the  stone-mason  order  of  architecture  dominat- 
ing it,  well-cared  for,  and  aggressively  commem- 
orating one  "  Gideon  Rippon,  of  the  Eagle 
House,  Edmonton,  and  of  the  Bank  of  Eng- 
land "  :  all  this  is  typical  of  the  relation  borne 
by  literature  to  Genteel  Society  in  England. 
Its  combined  cohorts  of  The  Nobility,  Clergy, 
and  Gentry  do  not  know,  and  do  not  want  to 
know,  about  the  burial-place  of  their  only 
Charles  Lamb ;  but  they  do  due  reverence, 
with  naive  and  unconscious  vulgarity,  to  the 
memory  of  the  bank  official  who  kept  Books  or 
handled  Money.  Lamb  himself,  with  his  large 
sense  of  the  ludicrous  and  his  small  sense  of 
the  decorous,  would  have  been  tickled  by  the 
harmony  between  this  state  of  affairs  and 
his  whole  life.  To  this  grave — a  peopled  soli- 
tude it  is  to  us — come  pilgrims  from  the  other 
side  of  the  ocean,  and  sometimes  the  Blue-Coat 
boys  in  small  groups.  The  dreary  and  tasteless 
head-stone  bears  Gary's  feeble  lines,  affection- 
ate enough,  no  doubt  ;  but  who  cares  to  wade 
through    a    deluge   of    doggerel,    to    learn    that 


140  Footprints  of  Charles  Lamb. 


Lamb's  "  meek  and  harmless  mirth  no  more 
shall  gladden  our  domestic  hearth  "  ?  The 
acutest  criticism  on  this  epitaph  was  made  by 
a  knowing  "  navvy,"  who,  having  spelled  it 
through  painfully,  said  to  his  companion  :  "  I'm 
blest  if  it  isn't  as  good  as  any  in  the  church- 
yard ;   but  a  bit  too  lojig,  eh,  mate  ?  " 

They  have  quite  lately  put  up,  in  the 
church's  single  aisle,  a  mural  monument,  in 
which,  under  twin  arches,  perked  up  with 
crocketed  commonplaces,  are  the  medallion 
busts  of  Charles  Lamb  and  William  Cowper. 
Under  the  former — the  only  one  which  con- 
cerns us  nov/ — is  cut  this  inscription,  fitly  fol- 
lowed by  Wordsworth's  impressive  lines  :  "  In 
Memory  of  Charles  Lamb,  the  gentle  Elia,  and 
author  of  the  Tales  from  Shakespeare.  Born 
in  the  Inner  Temple,  1775,  educated  at  Christ's 
Hospital,  Died  at  Bay  Cottage,  Edmonton, 
1834,  and  buried  beside  his  sister  Mary  in  the 
adjoining  churchyard — 

"  '  At  the  centre  of  his  being  lodged 
A  soul  by  resignation  sanctified  : 
Oh,  he  was  good,  if  e'er  a  good  man  lived.'" 


THE    GRAVE    OF   CHARLES   AND    MARV    ANNE    IAMB    AT    EDMONION. 


INDEX. 


"  A  Farewell  to  Tobacco," 

89. 
Addison,  Joseph,  78. 
Ainger,  Canon,  25. 
"Album  Verses,"  12S. 
Aldgate,  1 13. 
"  All's  Well  That  Ends  Well," 

95. 
Amiens,  gg,  100. 
Amwell  river,  97,  115. 
Anceps,  114. 
Aram,  Eugene,  61. 
Aristotle,  4. 
Ashe  river,  23. 
Atheimtiiu,   The,  128. 
Aunt  Hetty,  15,  40. 
Austen,  Lady,  135. 

Bacon,  Francis,  125. 
Balzac,  Honore  de,  57. 
Bank  of  England,  139. 
Bartholomew  Fair,  112. 
Bartlett's  Passage,  11. 
Barton,  Bernard,  61,  76,  102. 
Bay  Cottage,  137,  140. 
Bedford,  buke  of,  78. 
Bentham,  Jeremy,  4. 
Bethnal  Green,  114. 
Bird,  William,  12. 
Bishopsgate,  2g,  113. 
Blakesware,  22,  25,  49,  97. 
Blue-Coat  School,  The,  17,  20, 

46,  47,  I3g. 
Bodleian  Library,  116. 
Boswell,  James,  5. 


Boulogne,  68. 

Bow  Bells,  iig. 

Bow  Street,  78,  7g,  80. 

Boythorn,  96. 

Braham,  J.,  5. 

Brick  Court,  13. 

Brighton,  g8. 

British  Ladies'  Magazine,  28. 

British  Museum,  116,  123,  124. 

Brompton  Crescent.  34. 

Browne,  Sir  Thomas,  44,  132. 

Bruce  Castle,  114. 

Bruce,  Robert,  114. 

"  Brutus,"  100. 

Buildings,  Bartlett's,  11. 

Buildings,  Featherstone,  48. 

Buildings,  Mitre  Court,  53,  54, 

102. 
Buildings,  New,  7. 
Buildings,  Ram  Alley,  8. 
Buildings,     Southampton,     41, 

52,  54,  122. 
Buhver,  Lytton,  62. 
Buonaparte,  General,  34. 
Burney,  Captain,  61,  131. 
Barney,  Fanny,  61. 
Burney,  Martin,  6r,  63,  85,  120. 
Burns,  Robert,  133. 
Byron,  Lord,  3,  126. 

Cambridge,  98,  107. 
Carlyle,  Thomas,  47,  72,  124. 
Gary,  Rev'd  H.  F.,  124,  139. 
Gary,  F.  S.,  124. 
Castlereagh,  Lord,  70. 


142 


Index. 


Cervantes,  75. 
Chadwell  river,  115. 
Chancery  Lane,  54,  123. 
Chapel  Street,  38,  52. 
Charing  Cross,  6,  19. 
Charles  I.,  115. 
Chatham,  Earl  of,  34. 
Chelsea  China,  iii. 
Christ's   Hospital,    16,   29,   41, 

42,  69,  116,  140. 
Church  Street,  136. 
Cibber,  Colley,  7S. 
City,  The,  6,  26,  47. 
City  Road,  103. 
Clare,  Allan,  49. 
Clarke,  Mrs.  Cowden,  132. 
Clifford's  Inn,  70. 
Clive,  Robert,  27. 
Colburn,  H.,  126. 
Colebrook    Cottage,    no,    113, 

116. 
Colebrook  Row,  102,  103. 
Coleridge,  Samuel  Taylor,  17, 

19,  20,  33,  38,40.  41,44,45. 

46,  49,  50,  54,  59,  60,  63,  64, 

65,    66,    77,   85,   96,   97,   98, 

13^.  134- 

"  Coleridge,     Early     Recollec- 
tions of,"  126. 

Colman,  George,  Jr.,  5. 

Congreve,  William,  5. 

Cornwall,  Barry  (See  Procter). 

Cornwallis,  Lord,  27. 

Cook,  Captain,  61. 

Coote,  Sir  Eyre,  27. 

Cottle,  Joseph,  126. 

Covent  Garden,  78,  80,  81,  102. 

Cowper,  William,  5,  135,  140. 

Cranmer,  Archbishop,  17. 

Crown  Office  Row,  7,  S,  13,  14. 

Cunningham,  Allan,  61. 

Dalston,  103. 

Dante,  124. 

D'Arblay,-  Madame,  61. 


Da  Vinci,  in. 

De  Quincey,  Thomas,  62,  70, 

93,  108. 

"  Deserted  Village,  The,"  13. 
Dickens,  Charles,  6,  62. 
Drury  Lane  Theatre,  72,  81. 
Dryden,  John,  3,  78. 
Dyer,   George,  42,  68,  69,  70, 
104,  105. 

Eagle  House,  139. 

East  India  Company,  no.  135. 

East   India  House,   5,  26,  30, 

44,  82,  83,  126. 
Edward  VI.,  17,  116. 
Edmonton,   15,   114,    119,  129, 

134,  135,  139,  140. 
"  Elia,"  9,  58,  71,  75,   76,   82, 

94,  103,  125,  140. 

"  Ella,  Bridget,"  21,  94. 
"Elia,  Last  Essavs  of,"    iig, 

128. 
Elizabeth,  Princess,  116. 
Elliston,  R.  W.,  72. 
Embankment,  The,  14. 
Emerson,  Ralph  Waldo,  64. 
Enfield,  43, 112,  113,  114,  115, 

118,  119,  120,  135. 
Enfield  Chase,  115. 
"English    Bards    and    Scotch 

Reviewers,"  126. 
£>7glis/i>nan's  Magazine,   The, 

127,   I2«. 
Epping  Hills,  117. 
Essays  of  Charles  Lamb  : 

Blakesmoor  in  H shire, 

24. 
Child  Angel,  The,  16. 
Confessions  of  a  Drunk- 
ard, 74,  90. 
Mackery  End,  94. 
My  First  Play.  42. 
New  Year's  Eve,  51. 
Old  Benchers  of  the  Inner 
Temple,  9. 


ndex. 


«43 


Old  Margate  Hoy.The,  gS. 
Peter's  Net,  127. 
Popular  Fallacies,  127. 
South  Sea  House,  The,  29. 
Superannuated  Man,  The, 

III. 
Two  Races  of  Men,  The, 

31- 
Evans,  William,  126. 
Evelyn,  John,  ^,  112. 
Every  Day  Book,  The,\2,  123. 
"  Excursion.  The,"  86. 
Exeter  Exchange,  6. 

Falstaff,  105. 

"  Falstaff's    Letters,"  121. 
Fetter  Lane,  3,  11. 
Field,  Mrs..  22,  25. 
Fielding,  Henry,  5,  43. 
Finden,  \V.,   126. 
Fleet  Market,  The,  iS. 
Fleet  Street,  19,  122. 
Forster,  John,  5. 
Franklin,  Benjamin,  3. 
Frase/s  Mai^azi7ie,  127. 
FuUeylove,  John,  14. 

Gardens,  The  Temple,  14. 

Garrick,  David,  g,  123. 

Gate  Street,  33- 

Gay,  John,  78. 

Gilchrist,  Mrs.  Annie,  91. 

Gilpin,  John,  114,  135,  136. 

Gladmans,  The,  21. 

Godwin,  WilHam,  60,  94. 

Goethe,  57. 

Goldsmith,  Oliver,  5,  13. 

"  Good-Natur"d    Man,    The," 

13- 

Gottingen,  66. 
Gracechurch  Street,  26. 
Gray,  Thomas.  107. 
Great  Fire,  The,  26. 
Great  Turnstile,  The,  48. 
Gutch,  John  Mathew,  41,  53. 


Hackney,  40. 
Hackney  Downs,  114. 
"  Hamlet,"  67. 

Hancock,  125, 

Hand  Court.  48. 

Hare  Court,  54. 

Hart  Street,  124. 

Hastings,  98. 

Hastings,  Warren,  27. 

Hatfield,  114. 

Haydon,  Benjamin  R.,  61,   70, 

71.  77- 
Hazlitt,     William,    4,    41,    60, 

65.  66,   73,   74,   77,   85,    91, 

98,  99,  120,  122,  125,  132. 
Hazlitt,  Mrs.,  69,  98. 
Hazlitt,  W.  Carevv,  38. 
Helena,  95, 
Heliogabalus,  87. 
Helvellyn,  6. 
Hermia,  95. 
Hertfordshire,  21,  22. 
'•  Hester,"  51. 

Hogarth,  William,  23,  58,  iii. 
Holborn,    11,   32,  33-   34.   3^, 

39,  40,  41,  48. 
Holland  House,  56. 
Hollis  Street,  3. 
Holy  Trinity  Church.  32. 
Hone,  William,  12,  123. 
Hood,    Thomas,    4.    61,     112, 

113,  115,  118,  120. 
Hook,  Theodore,  107. 
Hoole,  John,  27. 
House  of  Commons,  The,  86, 
Hoxton,  34,  37,  40,  49. 
Hunt,  Leigh,  4,  17.  20,  45,  6r. 

76,  III,  120,  125,   126,  131. 

Inner  Temple  Lane,  8,  9,  54, 

59.  79- 
Irving,  Edward,  61. 
Irving,  Washington,  3. 
Islington,    50,    52,    102,    104, 

113,  128. 


144 


Index. 


Isola,   Emma,   107,   120,    121, 

I2g. 
Italy,  34,  131. 

James  I.,  115. 
Johnson,  Samuel,  5,  6,  79. 
Joseph,  G.  F.,  126. 
"Juvenile  Poems,"  136. 

Keats,  John,  71,  136. 
Kelly,  iMiss,  117. 
King's  Bench  Walk,  52. 
Knowles,  Mr.,  34. 
Lakes,  The,  98. 

Lamb,  Charles  (mentioned), 
5,  7,  9,  II,  12,  13,  14,  17, 
19,  20,  21,  24,  2S,  29,  31, 
33.  36,  37-  38,  39.  40,  41, 
44,45,46,47,48,  54,  55,  56, 
58,  59,  60,  61,  62,  63,  64, 
66,  67,  68,  69.   70,  71,    72, 

73.  74,  75,  76,  77-  79,  So,  85, 
86,  90,  93,  94,  97,  100,  102, 

104,  107,  108,  109,  112, 
115,  117,  118,  119,  120, 
121,  123,  124,  125,  126, 
127,  128,  132,  135,  136, 
137,  138,  139,  140. 

Lamb,   John    (the    father),    9, 

10,  28. 

Lamb,  John  (the  son),  14,  28, 

29,  37.  38.  109. 
Lamb,    Mary    (mentioned),   5, 

11,  13,  14,  15,  21,  28,  38, 
40,  41,    53,   55,   58,   69,   73, 

74,  80,  81,  82,  89,  91,  94, 
95,    97,    98,    99,    100.   103, 

105,  107,  109,  112,  113,  118, 
120,  121,  123,  124,  12S,  130, 
132,  138,  140. 

Landor.    Walter    Savage,    96, 

120,  121. 
Lea  river.  97,  114. 
Leadenhall  Street,   26,  32,  82, 

no. 


"  Lear,  King,"  77. 

Leighton,  Archbishop,  133. 

Leipsic,  66. 

Leishman,  Mrs.,  113. 

Lime  Street,  26. 

Lincoln,  Abraham.  75. 

Lincoln's  Inn  Fields,  32,  33, 
48. 

Lion   House,  137. 

Little  Britain,  3. 

Little  Queen  Street,  32,  42,  48. 

Liverpool  Road,  38. 

Liverpool  Street,  114. 

Lloyd,  Charles,  45,  61. 

London,  3.  6,  7,  26,  74,  81,  97, 
100,  115,  130. 

London  Fields,  114. 

London  iMagazine,  The,  62, 
76,  82,  128. 

London  Road,  136. 

"  Lord  Byron  and  His  Con- 
temporaries," 126. 

Louvre,  The,  100. 

"Lovel,"9. 

Lucan,  64. 

"  Lyrical  Ballads,"  67. 

"  Macbeth,"  94. 
Mackarel  End,  21. 
Mackery  End,  21,  97. 
Maclise,  Daniel,  127. 
Macready,  W.  C,  72. 
Manning,  Thomas,  30,  52,  53, 

55,  61,  67,  72. 
Manse,  The,  117. 
Margate,  98. 

Metal  Exchange,  The,  26. 
Meyer,  Henry,  126. 
Middleton,  Bishop,  20. 
"  Midsummer  Night's  Dream," 

95- 
Mill,  John  Stuart,  27. 
Milton,  John,  3,  4,  67,  71,  130. 
Moliere,  75. 
Montagu,  Basil,  61. 


Index. 


M5 


Montaigne,  io3. 
Moore.    Thomas,  71. 
Morning  Chronicle,  The,  44. 
Moxon,  Edward,  127,  128,  129, 

130,  134- 
Moxon,  Mrs.,  130,  134,  135. 

"  Mr,  H ,  a  Farce,"  72. 

"  Mrs.  Leicester's  School,"  96, 

134- 
Mulready,  William,  96. 
Myddleton,    Hugh,  115. 

Napoleon,  60. 

Nether  Stowey,  64,  97. 

New  Monthly  Magazine,   The, 

127,  128. 
New  River,  97,  102,  103,   104, 

115,  116. 
Newgate  Street,  17,  46. 
Newton.   Isaac,  71. 
Noggs,  Newman,  38. 

Occhini,  ii6. 

Old  Bailey,  The,  18. 

"  On  Needle-work,"  96. 

Oriental  Bank,  The,  29. 

Otaheite,  131. 

"  Othello,"  94 

Ovid,  23. 

Oxford,  98,  99,  116. 

Palace  School,  The,  116. 
Paris,  68,  gg,  100,  loi. 
Patmore,  Coventry,  68. 
Payne,  John  Howard,  gg,  100. 
*'  Pencillings    by    the     Way," 

74- 
Pentonville,  38,  3g,  42,  48. 
Pepys.   Samuel,  7g. 
Petty  France.  3. 
Piscator,  114. 
Pitt,  William,  43,  115. 
Plantagenet,  14. 
Plumer  Family,  The,  22. 
Poe,  Edgar  Allan,  71. 


'  Poems  on  Various  Subjects," 
44. 

"  Poetry  for  Children,"  9G. 

Poplars,  The,  117. 

Portraits,  of  Charles  Lamb, 
124,  125,  126,  127;  of  Mary 
Lamb,  124. 

Primrose  Hill,  70. 

Prior,  Matthew,  9. 

Procter,  B.  W.  (Barry  Corn- 
wall), 5,  56,  61,  62,  92,  93, 
104,  107. 

Pulham,  Brook,  127. 

Quarterly  Review.  The,  75. 

Ratcliffe  Highway,  70. 
Regent's  Canal,  The,  103. 
"Religio  Medici,"  132. 
Rickman,  John,  86. 
Ridley,  Bishop  Nicholas,  17. 
Rippon,  Gideon,  139. 
Robinson,    Crabb,    58,    59,  62, 

63.  73,  99'  120,  125,  133 
Rousseau,  loS. 
Royal  Academy,  The.  127. 
Russell,  Lord  John,  66. 
Russell   Street,   78,  7g,  81.  82, 

go,  102. 

Sadler's  Wells,  103. 

St.  Andrews,  38,  3g. 

St.  John's  Wood,  135. 

St.  Martin's  Lane,  6. 

St.  Paul's,  ig,  47. 

St.  Paul's  Churchyard,  6. 

Salisbury,  g8. 

Salisbury  Plain,  56. 

Salt,  Samuel,  8,  9,  10,  11,  16, 

30,  32. 
Seine  river,  100. 
Seven  Sisters,  The.  114. 
Sevigne,  Madame  de,  57. 
Shaftesbury,  Lord,  43. 


146 


Index. 


Shakespeare,  14,  21,  43,  67,  68, 

94,  95-  134.  140- 
Shelley,  Percy  Bysshe,  45. 
Shelley,  Mrs.,  131. 
Shenstone,  William,  57. 
Siddons,  Mrs.,  44. 
Silver  Street,  114. 
Simmons,  Ann,  4S,  49. 
Skiddaw,  6. 
Smith,  Sydney,  66. 
Smollett,  Tobias,  78. 
South  Sea  House,  The,  29. 
Southey,  Robert,  46,  75,  76. 
Spenser,  Edmund.  5. 
Staple  Inn,  54. 

Starkey, ,  X2. 

Steele,  Richard,  78. 
Sterne,  Laurence.  57.  75. 
Stoddart.  Sarah,  92. 
Strand,  The.  6,  75,  131. 
Surrey  Hills,  The,  52. 
Swift,  Jonathan,  9,  43,  7S. 
Swinburne,   Algernon,  5. 

Table  Book,   The,  123. 
"  Tale  of  Rosamund  Gray  and 
Old  Blind  Margaret,"  45,  49. 
"Tales  from  Shakespear,"  96, 

134,  140. 
Talfourd,    Thomas    Noon,   45, 

56.  62,  126,  133. 
Talma,  lOl. 
Tasso,  27. 
Taverns  :    Bell,  135  ;  Bell  and 

John     Gilpin's     Ride,     136 ; 

Crown  and  Horseshoes,   117  ; 

Feathers,  4S  ;   Golden  Fleece, 

136  ;  Horse  and  Groom.  136  ; 

Hi  sing  Sun,  ir6  ;  Salutation 

and  Cat,  i,b,  47;   S'van,  114. 
Temple,  The,  5,  6,  7,  8,  11,  13, 

14,  i3,  32,  52,  53.  54,  56,  57, 

79,  So,  90,  94,  102,  140. 
Thackeray,  W.  M.,  87. 
Thames  river,  52. 


"  This    Lime-Tree   Bower    my 

Prison,''  64. 
Threadneedle  Street,  29. 
"Three  Memorable  Murders," 

70. 
Times,   The  London,  34. 
Titian,  5,  III. 
Tottenham,  113. 
True  Briton,  The.  36. 
Tuileries,  The,  100. 

Van  Diemen's  Land,  62. 
Versailles,  100. 

Wageman,  ,  126. 

Wainewright,  Thomas,  62. 
Walden,    Mr.   and   Mrs.,    129, 

130,  134- 
Walton.  Izaak,  10,  114. 
"Walton  Redivivus,"  115. 
Ware,  25,  97.  114. 
Warwick,  Earl  of,  14. 
"  Waverley,"  70. 
Westminster,  3. 
Westwoods,  The,  iiS,  130. 
Wheathampstead,   21. 
White  Hart  Lane,  114. 
White,  James,  121. 
Whittmgton.  Richard,  26. 
Widford,  25,  49. 
Wild,  Jonathan,  43. 
Willis," N.  P.,  74. 
Will's  Coffee  House,  78. 
Wilson,  Walter,  S3. 
Wiltshire.  98. 
Winterslow,  98. 
Winterton,  Alice,  48,  51. 
Wordsworth,  Dorothy,  So,  81, 

97- 
Wordsworth,    William,    6,    31, 

60,  63.  65.  67.  70,  73,  S3,  87, 

go,  97,   107,   109,    no,    117. 

135.  140. 
Worsley.  P.,  1 20. 
Wren,  Sir  Christopher,  47. 


BIBLIOGRAPHY, 

BY 

Ernest  D.  North. 


PAGE 

I.  Leading  Events  in  Lamb's  Life 149 

IL  First  Editions 150 

in.  The  "Eua"  Essays 165 

IV.   Reviews,   Poems,  Essays,   Etc 16S 

V.  Collected  Works 170 

VI.  Single  Works 172 

VII.   Letters 181 

VIII.  Poetical  Works 182 

IX.   Lambiana  : 

Biography,  Criticisms,  Etc 182 

Mag.azine  Articles 189 


The  measurements  given  of  the  First  Editions  arc  for  uncut  copies, 
unless  otherwise  stated. 

The  edition  of  the  Works  and  Letters  of  Lamb  referred  to  is  Canon 
Ainger's. 

In  giving  the  title-pages  no  attempt  has  been  made  to  reproduce  the 
various  types  used. 


I.    LEADING    EVENTS    IN    LAMB'S    LIFE. 

1775.  Born  February  10,  Crown  Office  Row,  Temple. 

17S2  (aged  7).   Enters  Christ's  Hospital  School. 

i7S9(aged  14).   Leaves  school  and  enters  service  of  South  Sea 

House. 
1792  (aged  17).    Enters  service  East  India  Company. 

1795  (aged  20).   Resides  at  No.  7  Little  Queen  St.,  Holborn. 

1796  (aged  21).   Publishes  four  Sonnets  in  volume  of  "  Poems 

by  S.  T.  Coleridge." 

1797  (aged  22).   Removes  to  No.  45  Chapel  St.,  Pentonville. — 

Contributes  to  "  Poems  by  S.  T.   Coleridge, 
Charles  Lamb,  and  Charles  Lloyd." 
iSoo  (aged  25).   Writes  Epilogue  to  Godwin's  "Antonio." 

1801  (aged  26).   Removes    to   No.    16    Mitre-Court    Buildings, 

Temple. 

1802  (aged  27).    Publishes  "John  Woodvil." 

1806  (aged  31).    Produces  "  Mr.  H."  — a  Farce,  at  Drury  Lane. 

1807  (aged  32).    Publishes   "Tales   from  Shakespear  " — "Mrs. 

Leicester's    School." — Writes  Prologue     for 
"  Faulkener,"  by  Godwin. 

1508  (aged  33).    Publishes   "Specimens  of    Dramatic  Poets" — 

"  The  Adventures  of  Ulysses." 

1509  (aged  34).    Publishes    "  Poetry   for  Children." — Removes 

to  No.  4  Inner  Temple  Lane. — Lives  at  No. 

34  Southampton  Buildings. 
iSiT  (aged  36).   Publishes  "  Prince  Dorus." 
1813  (aged  38).   Writes  Prologue  for  Coleridge's  "  Remorse." 
1S17  (aged  42).   Removes  to  No.  20  Russell  St.,  Covent  Garden. 
i8r8  (aged  43).   Publishes  "  Collected  Works."     2  vols. 
1820  (aged  45).   Contributes  to  the  London  MagaziJie. 


I  =;o  Bibliography. 


1S23  (aged  4S).  Removes  to  Colebrooke  (Colnbrooke)  Row, 
Islington. — Publishes  "  Essays  of  Elia," 
First  Series. 

1825  (aged  50).   Retires   from  East  India  House. — Contributes 

numerous    articles    to    Hone's    Every   Day 
Book. 

1826  (aged  51).   Removes  to  Enfield. 

1827  (aged  52).   Contributes    Introduction    to    "The    Garrick 

Plays,"  in  Hone's  Table  Book. 

1829  (aged  53).   Lodges  in  Enfield. 

iS30(aged  55).  Publishes  "Album  Verses." — Contributes 
"  De  Foe's  Works  of  Genius"  to  Wilson's 
"  Memoirs  of   Daniel  De   Foe." 

1831  (aged  56).   Publishes  "  Satan  in  Search  of  a  Wife." 

1832  (aged  57).   Removes  to  Bay  Cottage,  Edmonton. 

1533  (aged  58).   Publishes  "  Last  Essays  of  Elia." — Contributes 

Epilogue    to    "  The    Wife,"  by    J.    Sheridan 
Knowles. 

1534  (aged  59  years  10  months)    Charles  Lamb  dies,  December 

27,  at  Edmonton. 


II.    FIRST    EDITIONS. 

S^Armnged  Chronologically.^ 
1796. 

[i] 

Title  :  POEMS  |  ON  |  VARIOUS  SUBJECTS,  |  by  S.   T. 
COLERIDGE,  |  late  of  Jesus   College,  Cambridge  |  [Quo- 
tation].    London  :  |  Printed  for  G.  G.  and  J.  Robinsons,  and  | 
J.  Cottle.  Bookseller,  Bristol.  |  1796.      i6mo. 

Collation  :  Bastard  Title,  i  page,  Title,  i  page.  pp.  xvi. 
pp.  188.  "Errata,"  i  unnumbered  page  of  Advertisement, 
"  Published  by  the  same  author."     Size  b\  X4. 


Bibliography.  1 5 1 


Note.  Coleridge  says  in  the  Preface,  "The  Effusions  signed  C.  L. 
were  written  by  Mr.  Charles  Lamb,  of  the  India  House-  independently 
of  the  signature  their  superior  merit  would  have  sufficiently  distin- 
guished them."  There  are  four,  viz.  :  VII.  "  To  Mrs.  Siddons."  XI. 
Beginning  '•  Was  it  some  sweet  device  of  faery  land  ? "'  XII.  Beginning 
"  Methinks  how  dainty  sweet  it  were,  reclin'd."  XIII.  "  Written  at 
midnight,  by  the  sea-side,  after  a  voyage." 

Price.  Johnson  Sale,  N.  Y.,  1890,  $9.50  [calf,  gilt]. 
Sotheby's,  1887  [morocco,  gilt  top],  £•}>   iS-f- 


1797. 

[2] 

Title:   POEMS,  |  BY  |  S.   T.  COLERIDGE  |  Second  edi- 
tion I  ,  to  which  are  now  added  |  PoEMS  |  BY  Charles  Lamb  | 
and  I  Charles  Lloyd  |  [Quotation].      Printed  by  N.  Biggs,  |  for 
J.    Cottle,   Bristol,  and   Messrs.  |  Robinsons,   London.  |  1797. 
i6mo 

Collation:  Title,  I   page.     pp.  xx.      pp.  278.      Size  61^x4^. 

Note.  Lamb's  contribution  was  eight  Sonnets  and  a  Dedication,  viz.: 
"  Fragments,"  (6)  "  A  Vision  of  Repentance,"  in  Supplement,  "  Child- 
hood," "  Grandame,"  "The  Sabbath  Bells,"  "Fancy,"  "The  Tomb  of 
Douglas." 

"There  were  inserted  in  my  former  Edition  a  few  Sonnets  of  my 
Friend  and  Old  Schoolfellow,  Charles  Lamb.  He  has  now  communi- 
cated to  me  a  complete  collection  of  all  his  Poems — guts  qui  non  prorsiis 
aiitet  ilium  onines  et  virtuies  ct  veneres  ordore.^'' 

This  volume  contains  two  Prefaces,  one  to  the  First  Edition,  signed 
S.  T.  C,  and  one  to  Second  Edition,  signed  "Stowey,  May,  1797," 
S.  T.  C. 

Price.  Johnson  Sale,  N.  Y.,  1890  [calf,  gilt  top],  $8.00. 
Sotheby's,  1887  [calf],  £\  \^s.  Sotheby's,  1888  [calf,  gilt], 
£\  5J.     Sotheby's,  1S87  [calf],  £\  \os. 

1798. 

[3] 

Title  :  BLANK  VERSE,  |  by  |  CHARLES  LLOYD  | 
AND  CHARLES   LAMB.  I  London  :  I  Printed  bv  T.    Bens- 


I  ^2  Bibliography. 


ley,  I  for  John  and  Arthur  Arch,  Xo  23,  Grace-  |  church  Street 
I  179S.      l2mo 

Collation  :  Title,   I  page,  Double  Title,  i  page,   Dedication, 
I  page.     pp.  95.     Index,  i  page.     Size  6s  x4f. 

Price.  Johnson  Sale,  N.  Y.,  1S90  [morocco  uncut,  gilt  top], 
I28.00.      Sotheby's,  1890  [original  boards,  uncut],  £q). 

1798. 

[4] 

Title  :   A  TALE  |  of  |  ROSAMUND    GRAY  |  and  |  OLD 
BLIND    MARGARET.  |  by    CHARLES     LAMB.  |       Lon- 
don, I  Printed  for  Lee  and  Hurst,  |  No.  32,  Pater-noster  Row,  | 
179S.     Small  Svo 

Collation  :  Title,  l  page.  Dedication,  I  page.     pp.  134.     Size 

6f  X  4i. 

Note.  Another  edition  was  published  the  same  year  in  Birmingham. 
Printed  for  Thos.  Pearson,  pp.  134, 

With  the  exception  of  the  title-page  this  edition  is  identical  with  the 
London  one.  Charles  Lloyd's  father  lived  in  Birmingham,  and  it  is  sug- 
gested that  a  few  copies  had  been  struck  off  there.  [Dedication.  "This 
Tale  is  inscribed  in  friendship  to  Marmaduke  Thompson,  of  Pembroke 
Hall,  Cambridge."] 

Price.  Dodd  &  Mead  [morocco,  gilt.  Title  in  fac-simile], 
$50.00.     New   York,   1SS5   [Full    calf,    by    Bedford],   $25.00. 


1799- 

[5] 

Title  :     THE  |  ANNUAL    ANTHOLOGY,  ]  Volume  I  | 
Bristol  :  Printed  by  Biggs  and  Co,  For  |  T.  N.  Longman  and 
O.  Rees,  Paternoster- Row,  |    London  |  n,d.      i6mo 

Collation  :  Title,  i  page,  Advertisement,  l  unnumbered  leaf. 
Contents,  4  unnumbered  pages,      pp.  300.      Size  6J  x4i. 

Note.  This  volume  was  edited  by  Robert  Southey,  and  published  by 
Joseph  Cottle.  Among  the  distinguished  contributors  were  Coleridge, 
Southey,  Charles  Lloyd,  George  Dyer,  Mrs.  Opie,  Joseph  Cottle,  etc., 


Bibliography.  1 1^3 


etc.  Lamb  contributed  "  Living  Without  God  in  the  World,"  pp.  qo-ga. 
A  second  series  was  published  the  next  year  [See  Letter  to  Southey, 
November  2S,  179S],  which  contained  Coleridg-e's  Poem  "This  Lime- 
Tree  Bower  my  Prison,  A  Poem  addressed  to  Charles  Lamb  of  the 
India  House,"  pp.  140-144. 

Price.   Sotheby's,    1S88   [original  boards,   uncut],   £\.    [calf] 
;^l  IS- 

1800. 

[6] 

Title:     ANTONIO:    |    A  TRAGEDY    |    in   Five    Acts   | 
by  WILLIAM  GODWIN  |  ,    London  :  Printed  by  Wilks  and 
Taylor,  Chancery    Lane  |  For  G.  G.  and  J.    Robinsons,  Pater- 
noster Row  I  1800.     8vo 

Collation  :  Title,  1  page,  Advertisement,    I  page.   (Dramatis 
Person^e,  reverse.)     pp.  73.    Size  8i)X  5. 

Note.     Lamb  wrote  the  Epilogue  to  this  tragedy,  which  was  produced 
on  December  13,  1800,  at  Drury  Lane.     It  was  a  complete  failure.     [See 
Letter  of  Lamb  to  Manning,  December  16,  1800.] 
Price.    $3.50. 


[7] 

Title:  JOHN  WOODVIL,  |  a  TRAGEDY  |  by  |  C. 
LAMB.  I  to  which  are  added,  |  Fragments  of  Burton.  |  the  au- 
thor of  I  The  Anatomy  of  Melancholy.  |  London  :  |  Printed  by 
T.  Plummer,  Seething-Lane  :  |  For  G.  and  J.  Robinson,  Pater- 
noster-Row I  1802.      i6mo 

Collation :  Title,  i  page,  Dramatis  Persona;,  l  page.  pp. 
128.  •  Size  6i^x  4^. 

Note.  Lamb  had  written  this  three  years  earlier  than  date  of  pub- 
lication, and  had  showed  it  to  Southey  and  Coleridge,  who  tried  to  dis- 
suade him  from  publishing  it.  It  was  offered  to  John  Kemble  in  1799, 
but  declined.    The  original  title  for  the  play  was  "  Pride's  Cure." 

Price.  Johnson  Sale,  N.  Y. ,  1890  [calf,  gilt  top,  uncut], 
$19.00.  Scribner  &  Welford,  1889  [boards,  uncut],  I30.00. 
Dodd  &  Mead  [half  morocco,  yellow  edges],  $25.00.  Sotheby's, 


I  ^4  Bibliography. 


1889  [autograph  from  author],  ;(^ii    15J.     Pearson,  iSSg  [un- 
cut, original  boards],  ;i^5  10^. 

1807. 
[8] 

Ti//e:    MRS.    LEICESTER'S    SCHOOL.  |  or,  |  The    His- 
tory I  of  I  several    Young    Ladies,  |  related    by    themselves.  | 
London  :  |  Printed   for   AL  J.   Godwin,  at    the   Jvvenile  |  Li- 
brary, No.  41,  Skinner  Street  |  1807.     i6mo 

Collation  :  Frontispiece,  i  page.  Title,  i  page.  Contents,  i 
unnumbered  page.  pp.  viii.  pp.  17S.  Advertisement  o;i  re- 
verse of  last  page. 

Note.  Lamb  wrote  for  this  volume  "The  Witch  Aunt,"  "First 
Going  to  Church,"  "The  Sea  Voyage."  The  other  tales  were  by  Mary. 
The  copyright  for  this  and  "  Tales  from  Shaliespear "  was  sold  to 
Baldwin  and  Cradock  on  July  21,  1836,  by  Mary  Ann  Lamb,  for  ;^i5. 
The  original  holder,  according  to  the  Indenture,  was  William  Godwin. 

Price.  The  Second  Edition,  1809,  fetched  at  Sotheby's,  i838 
[original  boards],  ^^16  loj-.  [No  quotation  found  on  the  First 
Edition.] 

1807. 

[9] 

Title:  FAULKENER  :    |   A  |  TRAGEDY.    1   as  it   is  per- 
formed I  at  I  the   THEATRE    ROYAL.    DRURY   LANE  | 
By    ^VILLIAM    GODWIN  |  London  :  |  Printed    for   Richard 
Phillips,  6,  Bridge-Street.  ]  Black-Friars,  |  By  Richard  Taylor 
and  Co,  Shoe  Lane,  |  1S07.     8vo 

Collation  :  Title,  i  page.  Preface,  i  page.  Prologue,  I  page, 
Dramatis  Persona;,  i  page.     pp.  80.     Size  Si^  x  5. 

Note.  The  Prologue  was  by  Charles  Lamb.  The  tragedy  was  pro- 
duced at  Drury  Lane,  December  16,  1807.  The  subject  was  taken  from 
an  incident  in  De  Foe's  "  Roxana." 

Price.   Spencer,  1S90  [half  morocco],  £2  5J. 


Bibliography. 


■)"> 


1807. 
[10] 

Title :  TALES  |  FROM  |  SHAKESPEAR.  |  Designed  | 
for  the  use  of  young  Persons.  |  by  CHARLES  LAMB.  |  Embel- 
lished with  Copper-Plates.  |  In  two  volumes.  |  Vol  I  |  (Vol 
II)  I  London  :  |  Printed  by  Thomas  Hodgkins,  at  the  Juvenile 
Li-  I  brary,  Hanway-Street  (opposite  Soho-Square),  |  Oxford- 
Street  ;  and  to  be  had  of  all  |  Booksellers  |  .  1S07.  |  2  vols 
i2nio.     Size  6^x4. 

Collation  :  Vol  I.  Frontispiece,  i  page,  Title,  i  page.  pp. 
ix.  Contents,  r  page,  i  unnumbered  page.  pp.  235.  10  illustra- 
tions. Vol.  II.  Frontispiece,  i  page.  Title,  i  page.  Contents, 
1  page,  I  unnumbered  page.  pp.  261.  3  pages  of  adver- 
tisements.     Colophon:  Printed  by  T.  Davison,  Whitefriars. 

Note.  The  greater  number  of  these  Tales  are  written  by  Mary, 
viz.  :  "  Tempest,"  "As  You  Like  It,"  "  Winter's  Tale,"  "  Midsummer 
Night,"  ''Much  Ado,"  "Two  Gentlemen  of  Verona,"'  "  Cymbeline," 
"All's  Well  that  Ends  Well,"  "Pericles,"  "Taming  of  Shrew," 
"  Comedy  of  Errors,"  "  Measure  for  Measure,"  "  Twelfth  Night  ;"  the 
others  by  Charles  Lamb  :  viz.,  "  Othello,"  "  Merchant  of  Venice,"  "  Mac- 
beth," "King  Lear,"  "Romeo  and  Juliet,"  "Hamlet,"  "Timon  of 
Athens."  These  volumes  seem  to  have  been  issued  in  sheep,  there  being 
no  copies  in  original  boards  known.  Each  volume  has  ten  illustrations, 
engraved  by  William  Blake,  from  the  designs  of  Mulready. 

Price.  Spencer  Catalogue,  i8go,  in  the  original  calf,  ^22. 
Dodd  &  Mead,  1886  [morocco,  gilt  top],  1175.  W.  E.  Ben- 
jamin, 1SS7  [morocco,  gilt],  $50.00.  Sotheb3''s,  1S8S  [mo- 
rocco, gilt  edge],  ^^lo.  Pickering  &  Chatto  [original  calf], 
;^T4   14^-. 

1808. 

[II] 

Title.-    THE    I    ADVENTURES   |  of   |   ULYSSES  |  by  | 
CHARLES  LAMB  |  London  :  |  Printed  by  T.  Davison,  White- 
friars I  for  the  Juvenile  Library,  No.  41  Skinner-  |  Street,  Snow 
Hill  I  1808     i6mo 

Collation  :  Engraved   Frontispiece,    i  page,    Vignette    Title, 


1 56  Bibliography. 


I  page,  Title,  i  page.  pp.  vi.  pp.  203.  Advertisement  on 
reverse  of  page  203.     Size  6|  x4^. 

Note.  "  I  have  done  two  books  since  the  failure  of  my  farce :  they 
will  both  be  out  this  summer.  The  one  is  a  juvenile  book — the  '  Adven- 
tures of  Ulysses,"  intended  to  be  an  introduction  to  the  reading  of  Tele- 
machus !  It  is  done  out  of  the  Odyssey,  not  from  the  Greek  (I  would 
not  mislead  you)  nor  yet  from  Pope's  Odyssey,  but  from  an  older  trans- 
lation of  one  Chapman."     See  Letter  to  Manning-,  February  26,  1808. 

Price.  Johnson  Sale,  New  York,  1890  [morocco,  gilt],  $20. 
Sotheby's,  1888  [calf],  ;i^3  'js.bd. — uncut  original  boards.  £2,  3s. 
Sotheby's,  1889  [calf],  ^^5  12s.  M.  Robson  &  Kerslake,  1889 
[calf,  gilt],  £i  8j-.  Sotheby's,  1889  [calf],;^2  6s.  J.  Pearson 
[calf,  by  Bedford],  /"6  fij-.  Scribner  i^  Welford  [original 
boards,  uncut],  §16.00. 

1S08. 

[12] 

Title:     SPECIMENS    |    of    |    ENGLISH     DRAMATIC 

POETS,  I  who  lived  |  about  the  time  of   SHAKESPEARE  : 

I  with    Notes.  |  By    Charles    Lamb.  |  London:  |  Printed    for 

Longman,  Hurst,  Rees,  and  Orme,  |  Paternoster-Row.  |  1808, 

small  Svo 

Collation  :  Bastard  Title,  i  page,  Title,  I  page.  pp.  xii. 
pp.  484.     Size  5  X  7^. 

Note.  "  It  is  done  out  of  the  old  Plays  at  the  Museum  and  out  of 
Dodsley's  Collection,  etc.  It  is  to  have  Notes."  [See  Letter  to  Manning, 
February  26,  1808.] 

Price.  Johnson  Sale,  N.  Y.,  iSgo  [morocco,  gilt],  !?7.oo. 
Sotheran,  1S90  [uncut],  £2  2s.  J.  Pearson,  1890  [half  calf, 
gilt  top,  uncut],  £3  iss.  Scribner  &  Welford  [boards,  un- 
cut], $16.50. 

1S09. 

[13] 

Tille.-  POETRY  |  for  |  CHILDREN  |  ENTIRELY  ORI- 
GINAL I  By  the  Author  of  |  "  Mrs.  Leicester's  School"  |  In 
Two    volumes  |  vol    I  |  (vol  II)  |  London  :    |  Printed    for    M. 


Bibliography.  1S7 


J.  Godwin,  |  At  the  Juvenile  Library,  No.  41,   Skinner  Street, 

I  1809.  2  vols  i8mo 
Collation :  Vol.  I.  Frontispiece,  i  page,  Title,  i  page,  Table 
of  Contents  i  page.  pp.  103.  i  page  of  Advertisement. 
Colophon  :  Mercier  and  Shervet,  Printers,  No.  32,  Little  Bar- 
tholomew Close,  London.  Vol.  IL  Frontispiece,  i  page, 
Title,  I  page,  Table  of  Contents,  i  page.  pp.  104.  Colophon  : 
Printed  by  Mercier  and  Chervet,  No.  32,  Little  Bartholomew 
Close,  London.  Bound  in  gray  paper  with  green  leather 
backs. 

Note.  Lamb  contributed  to  this  '•  The  Three  Friends,"  "  To  a  River 
in  which  a  Child  was  Drowned,"  "  Queen  Oriana's  Dream,"  besides 
other  poems  not  certainly  identified  ;  the  rest  were  by  Mary.  The  Fron- 
tispiece to  Vol.  I.  is  a  little  boy  seated  in  a  Landscape,  with  the  line 
"  Keep  on  your  own  side,  do  Grey  Pate.  Page  29."  Vol.  IL,  the  Fron- 
tispiece is  "  Penitent  Richard  standing  in  a  Landscape,"  with  three  lines 
of  poetry.  At  the  time  of  the  Locker  Catalogue,  1886,  only  one  perfect 
copy  was  known  [see  Gentleman's  Magazine,  July,  1877,  for  account  of 
its  discovery].  It  was  reprinted  at  Boston  in  1812.  A  Mrs.  Tween, 
daughter  of  Lamb's  friend  Mr.  Randall  Norris,  has  a  copy  of  "  Poetry 
for  Children  "  given  her  by  Mary  Lamb. 

Price.  Sotheby's,  1888,  £1^  [Leycester's  Sale,  November 
12-14]. 

1811. 

[14] 

Title  :  PRINCE  DORUS  :  |  or,  |  Flattery  put  out  of 
Countenance,  |  A  Poetical  Version  of  an  Ancient  Tale.  |  Il- 
lustrated with  a  series  of  Elegant  Engravings.  |  I^ondon  :  | 
Printed  for  M.  J.  Godwin,  |  at  the  Juvenile  Library,  No  41 
Skinner  St  ;  |  and  to  be  had  of  all  Booksellers  and  Toymen  in 
the  I  United  Kingdom.  |  181 1.     i2mo 

Collation  :  Frontispiece,  I  page,  Title,  i  page.  pp.  31. 
Illustrations:  Frontispiece  to  face  Title,  "The  Enchanted 
Cat;"  p.  6,  "  Minon  Asleep;"  p.  7,  "The  Transforma- 
tion ;  "  p.  10,  "  Prince  Dorus  and  his  Maids  ;  "  p.  ig.  "  Clari- 
bel  Carried  Off;"  p.  21,  "  Visit  to  the  Beneficent  Fairy;" 
p.  23.    "Prince    Dorus  Offended  ; "    p.   29,    "Truth    Brought 


Bibliography. 


Home  ;"  p.  31,  "Self  Knowledge  obtains  its  Reward."  Size 
5Jx4f. 

Note.  Only  a  few  copies  known  to  exist.  The  authenticity  of  this 
volume  is  established  by  a  reference  in  Crabb  Robinson's  Diary,  May 
15,  iSii.  There  are  two  editions,  plain  and  colored,  not  differing  in 
any  other  particular.  The  bacli  cover  should  be  preserved,  as  it  con- 
tains a  curious  woodcut  of  Prince  Dorus  (The  Long-nosed  King)  and 
Aged  Fairy.  There  are  copies  with  Title-page  put  on  cover  within  a 
key  border. 

Price.  Dodd  &  Mead  [188S],  $175  ;  colored  [1888],  mo- 
rocco, $300.  Sotheby's,  1888,  ^-^o.  Sotheby's,  1889  [colored, 
dated  1818],  ^^45.     Sotheby's,  1890,  ;^29  loj-.  [original  boards]. 

181  I    (?). 

[15] 

Title:  BEAUTY  |  AND  |  THE  BEAST  :  |  or  |  A  rough 
OUTSIDE  WITH  A  |  Gentle  he.\rt  |  A  Poetical  version  of  an 
Ancient  Tale  |  Illustrated  with  a  |  Series  of  Elegant  Engravings 

I  And  Beauty's  Song  at  Her  Spinning  Wheel  |  Set  to  Music 
by  Mr  Whitaker  |  London  :  1  Printed  for  M.  J.  Godwin,  |  At 
the  Juvenile  Library,  41,  Skinner  Street  ;  |  and  to  be  had  of  all 
Book.sellers  and  Toymen  |  throughout  the  United  Kingdom.  | 
Price  5s  6d  coloured,  or  3s.  6d.  plain  |  Square  i6mo,  n.d. 

Collation  :  Frontispiece,  i  page.  Title,  i  page.  pp.  32. 
Colophon,  London  :  Printed  by  B.  M'Millan,  |  Bow  Street, 
Covent  Garden  |  .  Illustrations  :  Frontispiece,  "  Beauty  in  her 
prosperous  state."  Face  page  4,  "  Beauty  in  a  State  of  Ad- 
versity." Page  II,  "  The  Rose  Gather'd."  Page  16, 
"Beauty  in  the  Enchanted  Palace."  Page  19,  "Beauty 
visits  her  Library."  Page  21,  "  Beauty  entertained  with  in- 
visible music."  Page  28,  "'  The  absence  of  Beauty  Lamented." 
Page  29,  "  The  Enchantment  Dissolved."  Music  :  Beauty's 
Song  [music  and  second  verse  on  reverse].     Size  5^x4^. 

Note.  The  original  is  in  paper-covered  boards,  ro.xburghe  backs, 
with  woodcut,  underneath  which  are  written  the  words  "'Go,  be  a 
Beast!'  Homer."  The  engravings  are  supposed  to  be  by  Maria  Flax- 
man,  sister  of  the  sculptor.    On  page  3  there  is  a  watermark  dated  1810. 


Bibliography.  1 59 


Price.  Sotheby's,  July  9,  18S9  ["  Sale  of  Original  Drawings 
to  Martin  Chuzzlewit  "],  etc.,  fetched  ^(^34.  Sotheby's  [plates 
misplaced],  1890,  ;{J^20. 

18.3. 

[16] 

Title :  REMORSE.  |  A  TRAGEDY,  1  in  five  acts.  !  By 
S.  T.  COLERIDGE  |  .  [Quotation]  London  :  |  printed  for  W. 
Pople,  67,  Chancery  Lane.  |  1813  |  Price  three  shillings.  |  8vo. 

Collation :  Title,  i  page.  pp.  viii.  Prologue,  i  unnum- 
bered page,  Dramatis  Persona;,  i  unnumbered  page.     pp.  72. 

Size  si  x85. 

JVote.  The  Prologue  was  written  by  Lamb  and  spoken  by  Mr.  Carr. 
The  Play,  written  in  1797,  was  originally  entitled  '■  Osorio."  It  was 
brought  out,  revised,  and  re-named  "  Remorse,"  at  Drury  Lane,  on 
January  23,  1813,  and  had  a  run  of  twenty  nights.  The  London  Times 
of  January  25  said  of  the  Prologue  :  '•  The  Prologue  was,  we  hope,  by 
some  'd— d  good  natured  friend,'  who  had  an  interest  in  injuring  the 
play.     It  was  abominable."  . 

Frice.    Scribner  &  Welford  [half  calf],  $6.50. 

1814. 

[17] 

Title:  SOME  |  ENQUIRIES  |  INTO  |  THE    EFFECTS 
I  of  I  FERMENTED   LIQUORS.  |  By  a  Water  Drinker.  | 
London  :  |  Printed  for  J.  Johnson  and  Co.  |  St.  Paul's  Church 
yard  |  1814.     8vo 

Collation:  Frontispiece,  I  page.  Title,  i  page,  Table  of 
Contents,  i  page.  pp.  xxxii.  pp.  368.  Five  illustrations,  in- 
cluding Frontispiece.      Size  8g  x  si. 

Note.  Charles  Lamb  contributed  sixteen  pages  to  this  volume 
anonymously,  viz.:  pp.  201-216,  entitled  "Confessions  of  a  Drunkard." 
The  author  and  compiler  was  Basil  Montagu.  The  Essay,  with  a  few 
additional  pages,  was  reprinted  in  the  London  Magazine,  August,  1822, 
and  signed  "  Elia." 

Price.  Sotheby's,  18S8  [calf  gilt],  £2  \os.  Hitchman's,  1890 
[boards,  uncut],   i\s.      Sotheran's  [calf,  by  Bedford],  £z  \os. 


i6o  Bibliography. 


Pearson's,  iSSg  [boards,  uncut],  £i  ^s.     Scribner  &  Welford, 
$25.00  [calf]. 


[18] 

Title:  THE  |  WORKS  |  OF  |  CHARLES  LAMB.  |  In 
TWO  VOLUMES.  |  vol  I  |  (vol  II)  |  London  :  |  Printed  for  C.  and 
J.  Oilier,  I  Vere-street,  Bond-street  |  181S.     2  vols     i6mo 

Collation  :  Vol.  I.  Title,  i  page.  pp.  ix.  i  unnumbered 
page.  pp.  291.  Vol.  II.  Title,  i  page.  Contents,  i  unnum- 
bered page.  Inscription,  i  unnumbered  page.  pp.  259.  Ad- 
vertisement. 2  pages.     Size  6J  x  4Jr. 

Note.  The  dedication  is  to  Coleridge,  and  in  it  Lamb  says:  "  My 
friend  Lloyd  and  myself  came  into  our  first  battle  (authorship  is  a  sort  of 
warfare)  under  cover  of  the  great  Ajax."  There  are  two  different  issues 
of  this  date,  one  on  thicker  paper  and  a  trifle  taller  than  the  other. 

Price.  Sotheby's,  18S7  [half  calf],  £1  e,s.  [calf,  uncut],  £2. 
Sotheran  [original  boards,  with  book  label  of  Wm.  Hazlitt], 
£<S  5.f.  Sotheby's,  1889  [original  boards],  £2  los.  J.  Pearson, 
1889  [original  boards,  uncut],  ^^4  4^.  Scribner  &  Welford 
[original  boards,  uncut],  $25.00. 


1823. 

[19] 
Title :    ELIA.  |  Essays    which    have   appeared   under 

THAT  SIGNATURE  |   IN  THE  |   LONDON  MAGAZINE.    |   London  :   | 

Printed   for  Taylor  and  Hessey,  |  93,   Fleet    Street,  |  and  13, 
Waterloo  Place.  |  1823.     i2mo 

Collation  :  Bastard  Title,  i    page.  Title,  i  page,  Contents,  2 
unnumbered  pages,    pp.  341.     Size  7I  x  5. 

Note.    These  Essays  were  contributed  mainly  to  the  London  Maga- 
zine between  August,  1820,  and  October.  1822. 

Price.    Sotheby's,   1887  [calf],  ^^i.     [Elia  and  Last  Essays 
together]  Sotheby's,  1S88  [russia,  uncut],  ^11  15^. 


Bibliography.  i6i 


1825-6. 
[20] 

Title:  THE  |  EVERY-DAY  BOOK  :  |  or,  the  |  Guide  to 
THE  Year;  |  relating  the  |  Popular  Amusements,  |  Sports,  Cere- 
monies, Manners,  Customs,  and  Events,  |  incident  to  |  the  365 
Days  I  in  past  and  present  Times  ;  |  being  |  A  Series  of  5000 
Anecdotes  and  Facts  ;  |  forming  ]  a  History  of  the  Year,  |  A 
calendar  of  the  Seasons,  |  and  |  a  chronological  Dictionary  of 
the  Almanac  ;  |  with  a  variety  of  |  important  and  diverting  in- 
formation, I  for  daily  use  and  Entertainment,  ]  Compiled  from 
authentic  sources  |  by  William  Hone  |  [Quotation  from  Iler- 
rick]  I  Illustrated  by  Numerous  Engravings  |  London:  |  Printed 
for  William  Hone,  45,  Ludgate  Hill,  |  (to  be  published  every 
Saturday,  price  Threepence,)  |  and  sold  by  All  booksellers  in 
Town  and  Country.  |  1825.      2  vols.      8vo. 

Collation  ;  Vol.  I.  Title,  i  page,  Double  Title,  i  page,  Ex- 
planatory Address,  i  page,  Dedication,  l  unnumbered  page. 
Preface,  i  unnumbered  page,  Illustration,  "  Bona  Dea,"  i  page, 
pp.  852.  Vol.  II.  Frontispiece,  i  page.  Title,  i  page.  Dedi- 
cation, I  page,  Preface,  i  unnumbered  page.  pp.  viii.  pp.  832. 
General  Index,  19  pages. 

NffiL'.  This  was  issued  in  weekly  parts  and  a  new  title-page  printed 
when  bound.  The  Dedication  of  the  first  volume  is  to  Charles  Lamb. 
To  these  volumes  he  contributed  "The  Months,"  April  16,  1826  [Vol. 
II.]  ;  "  Reminiscence  of  Sir  Jeffrey  Dunstan,"  June  22,  1826  [Vol.  II.]  ; 
"Captain  Starkey,"  July  21,  1825  [Vol.  I.]  ;  "The  Ass,"  October  5,  1825 
[Vol.  I.]  ;  "  In  Re  Squirrels,"  October  17,  1S25  [Vol.  I.]  ;  "  Remarkable 
Correspondent,"  May  i,  1825  [Vol.  I.]  ;  "  The  Humble  petition  of  an 
unfortunate  Day,"  Aug^ist  12,  1826  [Vol.  I.]  ;  "  Quatrains  to  the  Editor," 
July  9,  1825  [Vol.  I.]. 

Price.     Sotheby's,  iSSg,  £2  Ss. 

1827. 

[21] 

Title:     THE  |  TABLE   BOOK  ;  |  by  William    Hone.  | 
with  Engravings.     [Motto]  Every  Saturday.  |  London  :  |     Pub- 


1 62  Bibliography. 


lished   for  William  Hone,  |  by  Hunt  and  Clarke,  York-Street, 
I  Covent-Garden,  |  1S27,  Svo 

Collation  :  Frontispiece  [Petrarch's  Inkstand],  i  page,  Title, 
I  page,  Preface,  i  unnumbered  page.     pp.  S70. 

Note.  This,  like  the  other  books  of  Hone,  was  issued  in  Parts,  every 
Saturday,  commencing  January  i,  1827,  Lamb's  contributions  being,  p. 
454,  '■  Mrs.  Gilpin  riding  to  Edmonton,"  and  p.  387,  "  Gone  or  Going," 
and  the  Introductions  to  the  Garrick  plays,  which  are  on  pages  56,  67,  80, 
96,  112,  128,  150,  162,  178,  192,  209,  224,  243,  256,  280,  291,  304,  320,  338,  352, 
368,  394,  400,  417,  440,  449,  467,  480,  500,  514.  530,  547,  578,  595,  610,  642,  663, 
676,  690,  704,  724,  737,  770,  784,  Sco.  817.  In  a  note  addressed  to  Hone, 
dated  January  27.  1827,  written  on  the  fly-leaf  of  a  copy  of  "  Specimens 
of  English  Dramatic  Poets,"  Lamb  proposed  this  series,  to  which  the 
editor  gladly  acceded.  The  copy  named  is  now  owned  in  New  York. 
Price.   £1  lOs. 

1830. 
[22] 

Title:     MEMOIRS  I  of  I  THE    LIFE    AND     TIMES] 
of  I  DANIEL  DEFOE:  |  containing  |  areviewof  his  writings, 

I  and  I  his  opinions  upon  a  variety  of  important  matters,  civil 
and  I  ecclesiastical.  |  By  Walter  Wilson,  Esq.  Of  the  Inner 
Temple.  |  In  Three  volumes.  |  London  :  |  Hurst,  Chance,  and 
Co.  I  1830.     3  vols     Svo 

Collation  :  Vol.  I.  Bastard  Title,  i  page,  Frontispiece,  I 
page,  Title,  i  page,  i  unnumbered  page.  pp.  Ixii.  Errata,  i 
page.  pp.  482. — Vol.  II.  Bastard  Title,  i  page.  Title,  i  page, 
pp.  xviii.  Errata,  i  unnumbered  page.  pp.  527. — Vol.  III.  Bas- 
tard Title,  I  page,  Title,  i  page.  pp.  xviii.  Errata,  i  unnum- 
bered page.     pp.  6S5. 

Note.  On  pages  428-9,  Vol.  III.,  appears  Lamb's  criticism  on  "  De 
Foe's  Works  of  Genius."  [Mr.  Wilson  says  :  "The  following  remarks 
upon  De  Foe's  Works  of  Genius  are  from  the  pen  of  the  Author's  highly 
esteemed  friend,  Charles  Lamb,  and  are  original."]  Pages  636,  7,  8,  9 
Lamb's  remarks  on  •'  De  Foe's  Secondary  Novels  "  appear.  These  are 
of  so  characteristic  a  nature  that  they  are  well  worth  perusal.  [Wilson 
adds  :  "  To  recall  the  attention  of  the  public  to  his  other  fictions,  the  pres- 
ent writer  is  happy  to  enrich  his  work  with  some  original  remarks  upon 
his  Secondary  Novels,  by  his  early  friend  Charles  Lamb,  whose  compe- 


Bibliography,  163 


tency  to  form  an  accurate  judgment  upon  the  subject,  no  one  will  doubt 
who  is  acquainted  with  his  genius."] 

Price.  Scribner  &  Welford  [Full  calf],  $18.00. 

1830. 

[23] 

Title:  ALBUM  VERSES,  |  with  a  few  others,  |  by 
Charles  Lamb,  |  [vignette]  London  :  |  Edward  Moxon,  64, 
New  Bond  Street.    |  1830    i2mo 

Collation  :  Title,  i  page.  pp.  vii.  pp.  150.  Size  ~\  x  4|. 
Note.  Dedication  to  Moxon.  "  Enfield,  ist  June,"  1830.  This  volume 
contains  "  Album  Verses,"  "  Miscellaneous,"  "Sonnets,"  "Commend- 
atory Verses,"  "  Acrostics,"  "  Translations  from  the  Latin  of  Vincent 
Bourne,"  "  Pindaric  ode  to  the  Treadmill,"  "  Epicedium,"  and  "  The 
Wife's  Trial.'' 

Price.  Scribner  &  Welford  [uncut,  original  boards],  $15.00. 
Sotheby's,  1889  [calf],  ;£i  5^.  Sotheby's,  1S90  [original 
boards],  £1  los. 

1831. 

[24] 

Title :  SATAN    IN   SEARCH    OF   A   WIFE  ;  |  with  the 
Whole  Process  of  |  his  Courtship  and  Marriage,  |  and  who 
Danced   at   the    Wedding.  |  by  |  an  Eye    Witness     [Engraved 
Title]      London  :  |  Edward   Moxon,    64    New  Bond    Street.  | 
M.DCCC.XXXI. 

Collation  .'  Engraved  (wood)  Frontispiece,  I  page,  Engraved 
(wood)  Title,  i  page.  Dedication,  i  unnumbered  page.  pp.  36. 
[Frontispiece  and  four  illustrations.]     Size  64-  x  3J. 

Note.  See  "  Letter  to  Moxon,  October  24. 1831."  Illustrations,  [wood- 
cuts,] should  face  pages  3,  21,  32,  with  tail-piece  ['•  To  delicate  bosoms, 
that  have  sighed  over  the  '  Loves  of  the  Angels,'  this  poem  is  with  ten- 
derest  regard  consecrated").    The  original  cover  should  be  preserved. 

Trice.  Sotheby's,  18S8  [calf,  gilt  edge],  £2  3s.  Sotheby's, 
i8go  [original  wrappers],  ^8. 


164  Bibliography. 


1833- 

[25] 

Title  :  THE  WIFE  :  1  A  Tale  of  Mantua,  |  A  Play,  In  Five 
Acts,  I  By  I  James  Sheridan  Knowles,  |  Author  of  "  Virgin- 
ias "  "The  Hunchback"  &c  |  London  :  |  Edward  Moxon, 
Dover  Street.  |  1S33.     Svo 

Collatioti  :  Advertisement,  i  page,  Title,  i,  Dedication,  i 
page.  Preface,  i  page,  Prologue,  l  page.  Dramatis  Persons, 
I  page.     pp.  120.     Size  8^  x  5. 

Note.  The  Epilogue  was  written  by  Charles  Lamb  and  spoken  by 
Miss  Ellen  Tree.  Knowles,  in  the  edition  of  his  plays  1833,  speaks  of  his 
debt  to  Lamb,  etc. 

Frice.     $2.50. 

1833- 
[26] 

Tif/e:    THE    LAST    ESSAYS    |    of   |    ELIA.  |    Being   |a 
sequel  to  Essays  published  under  |  that  Name.  |    London  :  | 
Edward  Moxon.  Dover  Street.  |  1833.  |  i2mo 

Collation  ;  Bastard  Title,  i  page.  Title,  l  page.  pp.  xii.  pp. 
283.     Size  8x5. 

JVate.  The  Preface,  somewhat  changed,  was  originally  published  in 
the  London  Magazine  and  signed  Phil-Elia. 

Price.  Johnson  Sale,  New  York,  i8go  [Full  morocco,  uncut, 
with  First  Series],  $42.00.  Sotheran,  London,  1890  [Full  calf], 
_^5  io.f.  [Both  Series,  half  morocco,]  £1  \os.  J.  Pearson, 
1890,  Both  Series  [original  boards,  uncut],  ;i^io  loj.  Scribner 
&  Welford  [morocco  gilt  on  the  rough],  $60.00. 


1796. 

[27] 
Title :     ORIGINAL   LETTERS,    Etc.    ]  of  |  SIR  JOHN 
FALSTAFF  |  AND  |  HIS  FRIENDS  :  |  now  first  made  pub- 
lic by  a  Gentleman,  |  a  descendent  of  Dame  Quickly,  |  from  | 
genuine  manuscripts  |  which  have  been  in  the  possession  |  of 
the    Quickly    family  |  near   four   hundred    years.  |  London  :  | 


Bibliography.  16= 


Printed  for  the  author  ;  |  and  published  by  |  Messrs.  G.  G.  & 
J.  Robinsons,  Paternoster-Row  :  |  J,  Debrett,  Piccadilly  :  and 
Murray  and  |  Highley  |  No.  32,  Fleet  Street,  |  1796  Small  8vo 
Collation  :  Frontispiece,  i  page,  Title,  i  page.  pp.  xxiv.  pp. 
123.     Size  61  X  4. 

Noie.  Canon  Ainger  states  [See  page  404  "  Elia "]  that  Southey 
believed  Lamb  had  a  hand  in  this  work.  The  Preface  in  particular  bears 
some  traces  of  his  peculiar  vein.  See  also  Letter  from  Gutch  to  Mr. 
Bliss,  page  155,  Hazlitt's  "  Charles  and  Mary  Lamb." 

Price.  New  York,  iS36,  [calf,  gilt,]  $15.00.  Robson  & 
Kerslake  [calf,  uncut],  ^3  3^-.      iS33. 

III.    THE  "  ELIA  "  ESSAYS. 

All  Fools'  Day April,  1S21,  London  Magazine. 

Amicus  Redivivus Dec.     1S23,  ''  '' 

Bachelor's  Complaint  of  the  Be- 
haviour of  INIarried  People  (A)  Sept.    1S22, 
Barbaras April,  1S25,  "  " 

Barrenness  of  the  Imaginative      ^         \ 

Jan.   / 
Faculty  in  the   Productions     -p  u    [-  1825,  Athenatim. 

of  Modern  Art '  ) 

Blakesmoor  in   H. shire.  ..  .Sept.    i^iZj,,  London  Magazine. 

Captain  Jackson Nov.    1824,  " 

Chapter  on  Ears  (A) March,  1S21  " 

Character  of  the  Late  Elia Jan.     1S23,  " 

Child  Angel:  A  Dream  (The).  .June,   1S23,  "  " 

Christ's     Hospital      Five      and 

Thirty  Years  Ago Nov.    1S20, 

Complaint  of  the  Decay  of  Beg- 
gars in  the  Metropolis  (A)  .  .  .June,  1S22, 

Confessions  of  a  Drunkard .\ug.    1S22,  "  " 

Convalescent  (The) July,   1825,  "  " 

Detached  Thoughts  on    Books 

and  Reading July,    1S22, 

Dissertation  upon  Roast  Pig  (A). Sept.    1822, 
Distant  Correspondents   Mar.    1S22, 


1 66  Bibliography. 


Dream-Children  ;  A  Reverie.  .  .Jan.     1S22,  London  Magazine. 

Ellistoniana Aug.    i%2)^, Englishman's  Mag. 

Genteel  Style  in  Writing  (The)  March,  \?>2b,  New  Monthly  Mag. 

Grace  before  Meat Nov.    1S21,  London  Magazine. 

Imperfect  Sympathies Aug.    1S21,  "  " 

Mackery  End,  in  Hertfordshire.  July,    i32i,  "  " 

Modern  Gallantry Nov.    1S22, 

Mrs.      Battle's      Ojiinions      on 

Whist Feb.    1S21,  "  " 

My  First  Play Dec.     1821,  "  " 

My  Relations   June,  1821,  "  " 

Newspapers    Thirty-five     Years 

Ago Oct.     1821, Englishman's  Mag. 

New  Year's  Eve Jan.      1S21,  London  JMagazine. 

Old  and  the  New  Schoolmaster 

(The) May,  1S21, 

Old  Benchers  of  the  Inner  Tem- 
ple (The) Sept.    1S21, 

Old  China March  1823, 

Old  Margate   Hoy  (The) July,    1S23, 

On  Some  of  the  Old  Actors.  ..  .Feb.    1822,  "  " 

On  the  Artificial  Comedy  of  the 

Last  Century  , April,  1822,  '"  " 

On  the  Acting  of  Munden Oct.     1S22,  "  " 

Oxford  in  the  Vacation Oct.     1S20,  "  " 

Poor  Relations May,  1S23,  "  " 

Popular  Fallacies  :  -j  -^''''■13°  6^"^'"  \  ^''^  '^^onthly  Mag. 

1.  That  a  Bully  is  always  a  Coward.  ... 

2.  That  Ill-gotten  Gain  never  prospers. 

3.  That  a  man  must   not  laugh  at  his 

own  jest 

4.  That  such  a  one  shows  his  breeding, 

etc 

5.  That  the   Poor  copy  the  vices  of  the 

Rich " 


Bibliography.  167 

6.  That  Enough  is  as  good  as  a  Feast.  .New  Monthly  Mag. 

7.  Of   two    Disputants,  the  Warmest  is 

generally  in  the  Wrong "  " 

8.  That   verbal  Allusions  are  not  Wit, 

because  they  will  not  bear  trans- 
lation    "  " 

9.  That  the  Worst  Puns  are  the  Best..  .  "  " 

10.  That    Handsome  is    that  Handsome 

Does "  «' 

11.  That  we  must  not  look  a  Gift-Horse 

in  the  Mouth "  «« 

12.  That    Home  is  Home    though   it    is 

never  so  Homely *'  •« 

13.  That  you  must  love  me  and  love  My 

Dog "  " 

14.  That  we  should  rise  with  the  Lark. .  "  " 

15.  That  we  should  lie   down   with   the 

Lamb "  " 

16.  That  a  sulky  temper  is  a  Misfortune.  "  " 
Praise  of  Chimney-Sweepers(The)May,  1822,  London  Magazine. 

Quakers'  Meeting  (A) April,  1S21,  " 

Rejoicings  upon  the  New  Year's 

Coming  of  Age Jan.  1S23, 

Sanity  of  True  Genius May,  1S26,  New  Monthly  Mag. 

Some  Sonnets  of  Sir  Philip  Svd- 

i^ey Sept.  1S23.  Loitdon  Magazine. 

South-Sea  House  (The) Aug.  1820,           "             " 

Stage  Illusion Aug.  1S25,           "             " 

Superannuated  Man  (The) 

To  the  Shade  of  Elliston Aug.  i?!2>'^,Englishman''s Mag. 

Tombs  in  the  Abbey  (The) Oct.  1S23,  London  Magazine. 

Two  Races  of  Men  (The) Dec.  1S20,           "             " 

Valentine's  Day Feb.  14,   1821,    The  Indicator. 

Wedding  (The) June,  1825,  London  Magazine. 

Witches,  and  Other  Night  Fears. Oct.  1S21,          "             " 


158 


Bibliography. 


IV.    REVIEWS,    POEMS,    ESSAYS,    Etc. 


A}27ittal  Anthology  (Cottle's\ 
1799,  "  Living  without  God 
in  the  World." 

Atheiiaiwi  (The),  [Prose]  Feb- 
ruary II,  1S32,  "On  the 
Death  of  Munden."  Jan- 
uary 12,  19,  26,  February 
2,  1S33,  "  On  the  Total 
Defect  of  the  Quality  of 
Imagination  observable  in 
the  works  of  Modern  British 
Artists."  November  30,1833, 
"  Thoughts  on  Presents  of 
Game."  January  4,  May 
31,  June  7,  July  19,  1S34, 
■'  Table  Talk  by  the  Late 
Elia."  [Poems]  January  7, 
1832,  "The  Self  Enchant- 
ed." February  25,  "  The 
Parting  Speech  of  the  Celes- 
tial Messenger  to  the  Poet." 
July  7,  "  Existence,  consid- 
ered in  itself,  no  blessing." 
March  9,  1S33,  "Christian 
Names  of  AVomen."  Decem- 
ber 7,  "To  a  friend  on  his 
Marriage."  December  21, 
"  To  T.  Stothard,  Esq  ,  on 
his  Illustrations  of  the  Poems 
of  Mr.  Rogers."  February 
15,  1834,  "  Cheap  Gifts  : 
A  Sonnet."  July  26,  1S34, 
"  To  Clara  N."  March  14, 
1835,    "To  Margaret    W." 

Blackzuood's  Alagazinc,  De- 
cember, 182S,  "  The  Wife's 
Trial."  January,  1829, "The 
Gipsy's  Malison."  May, 
1829,  "  The  Christening." 

Bristol  Journal  {^llie),  Febru- 


ary 7,  1819,"  Miss  Kelley  at 
Bath."     (Signed.  *  *  *  *) 

Champion  {The),  December  4. 
1814,  "  On  the  Melancholy 
of  Tailors."  (Signed,  Burton 
Junior.) 

Examiner^  The),  1822,  "Work." 
June  6,  1813,  "  The  Rey- 
nolds Gallery,"  "  Theatrical 
Notices."  July  4,  1819, 
"  Richard  Brome's  Jovial 
Crew,"  "Isaac  Bickerstaff's 
Hypocrite,"  August  2,  1819. 
"  New  Pieces  at  the  Ly- 
ceum,"August,  1819.  (These 
were  all  signed  *  *  *  *  ) 
January  16,  1820,  "  First 
Fruits  of  Australian  Poetry," 
(numerous  Epigrams,  etc.) 

Englishman' s  Alagazine,  Sep- 
tember, 1831,  "  Recollec- 
tions of  a  late  Royal  Acade- 
mician." 

Gentleman's  Magazine  ( The), 
June,  1813,  "  Recollections 
of  Christ's  Hospital." 

Gem  {The),  1830,  "Saturday 
Night." 

Hone's  Every  Day  Book,  April 

16,  1826,'  "The  Months." 
June  22,  1826,  "  Reminis- 
cence of  Sir  Jeffrey  Dun- 
slan."  July  21,  1825,  "Cap- 
tain Starkey."  October  5, 
1825,  "  The  Ass."    October 

17,  1825.  "  In  Re  Squir- 
rels." May  I,  1S25,  "  Re- 
markable Correspondent." 
August  12,  1825,  "  The 
Humble  Petition  of   an  Un- 


Bibliography. 


169 


fortunate  Day."  July  9,1825, 
"  Quatrains  to  the  Editor." 

Hone's  Table  Book,  p.  454 
[1S27].  "  Mrs.  Gilpin  riding 
to  Edmonton."  1S27,  '"  Epi- 
cedium,"  "  Gone  or  Going," 
P-  357- 

Indicator  {The),  January,  1S31, 
"  Elia  to  his  Correspon- 
dents." 

London  Magazine,  April,  1S21, 
"  Leisure."  December,  1822, 
"  Guy  Faux."  October, 
1823,  "Letter  to  Robert 
Southey,  Esq."  October, 
1S23,  "  Letter  of  Elia  to  his 
Correspondents."  Novem- 
ber, 1823,  "  The  Gentle 
Giantess."  November,  1823, 
"  On  a  Passage  in  the  Tem- 
pest." January,  1S25,  •'  Let- 
ter to  an  Old  Gentleman 
whose  Education  has  been 
Neglected."  January,  1825, 
"  Biographical  Memoirs  of 
Mr.  Liston."  February, 
1825,  '•  Autobiography  of 
Mr.  Munden."  March, 
1S25.  "'  Reflections  in  the 
Pillory."         April,  1825, 

"  The  Last  Peach." 

Morning  Chronicle,  1794,  Son- 
net, commencing:  "As 
when  a  child  on  some  long 
winter's  night."  [Written 
probably  in  conjunction  with 
Coleridge.] 

Monthly  Magazine,  January, 
1797,  "  To  Sara  and  her 
Samuel." 


vVt'w  Monthly  Magazine,  1825, 
"  The  Illustrious  Defunct." 
1826,  "  The  Religion  of 
Actors."  June,  1826.  "A 
Popular  Fallacy."  April, 
1835.  "'Charles  Lamb's  Au- 
tobiography." 1835,  "  On 
the  Death  of  Coleridge." 

Quarterly  Review,  October, 
1S14,  "  Wordsworth's  Ex- 
cursion." 

Reflector  {The)  [Leigh  Hunt's], 
iSii,  Vol.  IV.,  "A  Fare- 
well to  Tobacco." 

Theatralia  (No.  i).  "  On 
the  Tragedies  of  Shake- 
speare," 1811.  "Specimens 
from  the  writings  of  Fuller," 
iSii  (No.  4).  "  On  the 
Genius  and  Character  of  Ho- 
garth," 1811  (No.  3).  "On 
Burial  Societies,  and  the 
Character  of  an  Under- 
taker," 181 1  (No.  2,  Art. 
15).  "  On  the  Inconve- 
niences resulting  from  being 
hanged,"  iSil  (No.  3,  Art. 
13),  "  On  the  Danger  of 
Confounding  Moral  with 
Personal  Deformity,"  1811 
(No.  2,  Art.  15).  "  Hospita 
on  the  Immoderate  Indul- 
gence of  the  Pleasures  of  the 
Palate,"  iSii  (No.  4). 
'•  Edax  on  Appetite,"  1811 
(No.  4).  "  On  the  Custom 
of  Hissing  at  Theatres," 
1811  (No  3,  Art.  11). 
"  The  Good  Clerk,"  1811 
(No.    4,    Art.  23). 


170 


Bibliography. 


V.    COLLECTED    WORKS. 


l8iS.    The  Works  of  Charles 
Lamb.   In  two  volumes.    Lon- 
don,  C.  &  J.  Oilier,    iSiS.     2 
vols.      i2mo. 
The  first  collected  edition. 

1835,  The  Prose  Works  of 
Charles  Lamb.  London,  Mox- 
on,  1835.     3  vols.  i2mo. 

1836.  Prose  W  o  r  k  s  of 
Charles  Lamb.  London,  Mox- 
on.  1836.     3  vols.  8vo. 

183S.  The  Prose  Works  of 
Charles  Lamb.  London,  Mox- 
on,  1S38.     3  vols.  i2mo. 

The  Same,  1839. 

The  Same.      4  vols. 

1840. 

Another  edition,  1S47. 

1838.  The  Works  of  Charles 
Lamb,  comprising  his  Letters, 
Poems,  Essays  of  Elia,  etc., 
etc.,  with  Sketch  of  his  Life, 
by  T.  N.  Talfotird.  New 
York,  Harper  &  Bros.,  1838. 
2  vols.     i2mo. 

1840.  The  Works  of  Charles 
Lamb  [edited  by  Talfoiird,with 
Sketch  of  Life,  portrait  and  en- 
graved title].  London,  Moxon, 
1840.      8vo. 

The  Same.    1845.    8vo. 

The  Same.    1S52.    8vo. 

1850.  The  Prose  and  Poetical 
Works  of  Charles  Lamb,  with 
his  Letters  and  Life,  by  T.  N. 
Talfourd.  London,  Moxon, 
1850.     4  vols.  i2mo. 

edition.       Lon- 


Another 
don,  1852. 
—  Another 
don,  1S55. 


edition.      Lon- 


1855.  Works,  with  a  Sketch 
of  his  Life  and  Final  Memo- 
rials, by  Sir  T.  N.  Talfourd. 
New  York,  Harper  &  Bros., 
1855.     2  vols.     i2mo. 

1856.     Another  edition. 

;  Philadelphia,   W.    P.    Hazard, 
\  1856.     4  vols.     Svo. 

1S57.     Works,  with  Life,  by 

,  Sir  T.N.  Talfourd.   New  York, 

I  1857.     2  vols.  i2mo. 

I      1859.     The  Works  of  Charles 

,  Lamb.      A  new  edition.     [Por- 

t  trait    by    W'ageman,    engraved 

title     of     Christ's     Hospital.] 

London,   Moxon  &  Co.,  1859. 

8vo. 

1865.  The  Works  of  Charles 
Lamb.  A  new  edition.  In 
five  volumes.  [Portrait  by 
W^ageman.]  Boston,  William 
Veazie,    1S65.      5  vols.      i2mo. 

A  large  paper  edition  of  only  100 
copies  was  issued  at  the  same 
time. 

1865.  The  Works  of  Charles 
Lamb,  corrected  and  revised, 
with  Portrait.  New  York, 
Widdleton,  1865.  5  vols. 
i2mo. 

1867.  The  Works  of  Charles 
Lamb,  including  his  most  in- 
teresting Letters,  collected  and 
edited,  with  Memorials,  by  Sir 
T.  N.  Talfourd.  A  new  edition. 
London,  Bell  &  Daldy,  1867. 
8vo. 

1868.  The  Complete  Cor- 
respondence and  Works  of 
Charles  Lamb,  with  an  "Es- 
say on  the  Genius  of  Charles 


Bibliography. 


171 


Lamb,"  by  George  Augustus 
Sala  [edited  by  W.  C.  Hazlitt]. 
London,  E.  Moxon  &  Co. ,  ibGS. 
4  vols.   i2mo. 

It  is  only  justice  to  Mr.  Hazlitt  to 
say  that  this  edition  was  issued 
without  his  name  upon  the  title- 
page  ;  he  did  not  even  see  the 
proofs. 

1S70.  The  Complete  Corres- 
pondence and  Works  of  Charles 
Lamb,  with  an  Essay  on  his 
Life  and  Genius,  by  Thomas 
Purneil,  aided  by  the  Recol- 
lections of  the  author's  adopted 
daughter  [Mrs.  Moxon].  [Por- 
trait of  Charles  and  Mary,  the 
former  seated.]  London,  Ed- 
ward Mo.xon,  1870.  4  vols. 
i2mo. 

This  edition  contains  a  new  Pre- 
face by  Thomas  Purr.ell.  It  has 
the  first  volume  withdrawn  of 
the  issue  of  ib68. 

1870.  Works  and  Letters,  by 
Talfourd.  London,  Bell  & 
Daldy,  1S70.     8vo. 

1874.  The  Complete  Works, 
in  Prose  and  Verse,  of  Charles 
Lamb,  from  the  original  edi- 
tions, with  the  cancelled  pas- 
sages restored,  and  many  pieces 
now  first  collected.  Edited 
and  prefaced  by  R.  H.  Shep- 
herd. [Portrait.]  London, 
Chatto  &  Windus,  1874.     8vo. 

The  Same,  1875. 

The  Same,  1878. 

1875.  The  Life,  Letters,  and 
Writings  of  Charles  Lamb,  ed- 
ited, with  Notes  and  Illustra- 
t  i  o  n  s  by  Percy  Fitzgerald. 
[Portrait  by  William  Hazlitt.] 
London,  Edward  Mo.\on,  1S75. 
6  vols.     Svo. 

In  this  edition  the  narrative  por- 


tion of  Talfourd's  two  works 
has  been  retained,  condensed 
into  one  continuous  narrati\e, 
with  additions  both  in  te.\t  and 
notes,  while  the  Letters  are 
separated  from  Talfourd's  orig- 
inal matter  and  arranged  in 
groups,  forty  new  ones  beiner 
added.  ** 

The  Same,  1876. 

The  Same,  18S2-4. 

1876.  Works.  Edited  by 
Charles  Kent.  [Routledge's 
Standard  Library.]  London, 
1876.     Crown  Svo. 

The    Same.       London, 

1889. 

1876.  Works,  Poetical  and 
Dramatic,  Tales,  etc.  Rout- 
ledge,  1876.     Svo. 

1S79.  The  Complete  Works: 
with  a  Sketch  of  his  Life,  by 
Sir  T.  N.  Talfourd.  Personal 
Reminiscences  of  Lamb,  Cole- 
ridge, Southey,  Wordsworth, 
and  J.  Cottle,  by  an  American 
Friend.  [Enfield  Edition.] 
Portrait  and  Engravings. 
Philadelphia,  1S79,  Amies  Pub. 
Co.      Svo. 

1880.  Works,  etc.,  new  edi- 
tion. [Standard.]  New  York, 
1S80.      3  vols.  i2mo. 

1SS4.  Works,  etc.  New 
York,  1884.      5  vols.  l2mo. 

1S86.  The  Life,  Letters,  and 
Writings  of  Charles  Lamb. 
Edited,  with  Notes  and  Illus- 
trations, by  Percy  Fitzgerald. 
London,  John  Slark,  1S86.  6 
vols.      i2mo. 

An  e.xact  reprint  of  the  edition  of 
1875. 

188S.  [Collected  edition.  Ed- 
ited, with  Notes  and  Introduc- 
tions, by  Alfred  Ainger.]  Tales 
from  Shakespeare,  by  Charles 


172 


Bibliography. 


and  Alary  Lamb,  1878. — The 
Essays  of  Elia,  18S3. — Poems, 
Plays,  and  Miscellaneous  Es- 
says, 1384. — Mrs.  Leicester's 
School  and  other  Writings  in 
Prose  and  Verse,  1885. — The 
Letters  of  Charles  Lamb,  new- 
ly   arranged,    with    additions. 


Portrait.       2    vols.         18S8. — 

Charles  Lamb,  1S88. 
This  is  bj-  far  the  best  edition 
of  Lamb"s  Worlds.  E.xcepting 
the  biography,  the  dates  g^iven 
are  those  of  the  first  editions. 
The  latter  was  published  in 
the  "  English  Men  of  Letters" 
Series,  in  1S78,  but  is  slightly 
enlarged  so  as  to  be  uniform. 


VI.   SINGLE  WORKS. 


[A  rranged  A  Ipliabctically.  ] 


180S.  Adventures    of    Ulysses 
(The),      by      Charles 
Lamb.      .  London, 
iSoS.      i2mo. 
The  First  Edition. 

1819.  Adventures  of  Ulysses 
(The)  [by  C.  L.]'.  A 
new  edition.  Lon- 
don, 1819.      i2mo. 

1S27.  Adventures  of  Ulysses 
[by  C.  L.].  Designed 
as  a  supplement  to 
the  Adventures  of 
Telemachus.  A  new 
edition.  Baldwin, 
Cradock  &  Joy,  Lon- 
don, 1S27.      i2mo. 

1839.  Adventures  of  Ulysses 
(The)  [by  C.  L.]. 
[Engraving.]  Lon- 
don, 1S39.      i2mo. 

1S40. Another    edition. 

To  which  are  added 
Mrs.  Leicester's 
School,  etc.  London, 
1340.     Svo. 

1845. Another    edition. 

London,  1845.   i2mo. 


1 848. Another    edition. 

London,  1848.    l2mo. 

1879.  Adventures  of  Ulysses 
[Half  Hour  Series]. 
N.  \.,  Harper  & 
Bros.,  1879.      32mo. 

1886.  Adventures  of  Ulysses. 
Edited  with  notes  for 
schools.  Boston,  Ginn 
&  Co.,  18S6.      i6mo. 

1890.  Adventures  of  Ulysses. 
With  an  introduction 
by  Andrew  Lang. 
[Map.]  London, 

[1890.]    Square  i2mo. 

1830.  Album  Verses,  with  a 
few  others,  by  Charles 
La  m  b  .  [Engraved 
title.]  London,  1830. 
i2mo. 

1798.  Blank  Verse,  by  Charles 
Lamb  and  Charles 
Lloyd.  London, 
1798.      i2mo. 

[181 1.?]  Beauty  and  the  Beast ; 
or,  a  Rough  outside 
with  a  Gentle  Heart. 
A  poetical  version  of 
an  ancient  Tale.  Illus- 
trated with  a  series  of 


Bibliography. 


173 


Elegant  Engravings, 
and  Beauty's  Song  at 
her  Spinuing-wheel, 
set  to  nuisic  by  Mr. 
Whitaker.  London, 
n.d.  [iSii  ?].  Square 
24mo. 

The  First  Edition. 

1S13.  Another        edition, 

1S13.      24mo.  j  1828. 

1325.  Beauty  and  the  Beast  ; 
or,  a  Rough  outside 
with  a  Gentle  Heart, 
etc.  London,  William 
Jackson  &  Co.,  at  the 
Juvenile  Library,  195 
St.  Clemens.  Strand, 
1825.  S-f-  plain,  5^. 
colored. 

1886.  Beauty    and  the    Beast  ; 

or,  a  Rough  outside 
with  a  Gentle  Heart. 
A  Poem  by  Charles 
Lamb,  now  first  re- 
printed from  the  ori- 
ginal edition  of  i8ir, 
with  Preface  and 
Notes  by  Richard 
Heme  .Shepherd. 
London,    18S6.  i2mo. 

1887.  Beauty    and    the    Beast, 

by     Charles      Lamb,     1833. 
with  an   Introduction 
by      Andrew      Lang. 
Illustrated.     London,  ' 
n.d.  [18S7  ?].     Square  1 
i2mo.  [Published  with  I  1S35. 
plates  in  two  states.] 

1S23.   Elia.         Essays      which  |  1838. 
have  appeared  under  ' 
that   signature    in  the  !  1S40. 
London        JlagaziiiL'. 
London,  1S23.    i2mo.  '  1S33. 
The  First  Edition. 

182S.   Elia.    Essays  which  have  I 


appeared  under  that 
signature  in  the  Lon- 
don Magazine.  Phila- 
delphia, Carey,  Lea, 
and  Carey,  1828. 
1 8  mo. 

The  First  American 
Edition.  An  exact  re- 
print of  the  English. 

Elia.  Essays  which 
have  appeared  under 
that  signature  in  the 
London  Magazine. 
Second  Series.  Phila- 
delphia, Carey,  Lea, 
and  Carey,  1828. 
iSmo. 

A  curious  fact  concern- 
ing this  is  that  the  sec- 
ond series  was  reprinted 
five  years  before  the  Eng- 
lish Edition  appeared. 
It  was  done  by  some 
one  who  did  not  know 
Lamb's  style  thorough- 
ly, as  several  of  his  best 
Essays  were  not  in- 
cluded, and  others,  not 
his.  were,  viz.:  "Nuns 
and  Ale  of  Caverswell," 
by  Allan  Cunningham, 
and  "  Valentine's  Day," 
"  Twelfth  Night  :  or 
What  you  'Will,"  by  B. 
W.  Procter. 

Elia.  Essays  which 
have  appeared  under 
that  signature,  etc. 
A  New  Edition.  Lon- 
don, 1833.     Post  8vo. 

Elia,     etc.  London, 

1835.     Post  8vo. 

Elia,      etc.  London, 

183S.     Post  8vo. 

Elia,  etc.  London, 
1840.     i2mo. 

[Elia.]  Last  Essays  of 
Elia  (The).  Being  a 
sequel  to  Essays  pub- 


174 


Bibliography. 


lished  under  that 
name.  [Second  Se- 
ries.] London,  1833. 
Small  Svo. 

The  First  Edition,  re- 
printed the  same  year  in 
Philadelphia,  i2mo. 

1835.  The  Same.     [Both 

Series.]  A  New  Edi- 
tion. London,  1835. 
Svo.     2  vols. 

1S36.  The   Same.     [Both 

Series.]  A  New  Edi- 
tion. London,  1836. 
Svo. 

1840.  The  Same.     [Both 

Series.]  Complete  in 
One  Volume.  Lon- 
don, 1S40.      i2mo. 

The  series  are  paged 
separately. 

1843.  The   Same.     [Both 

Series.]  A  New  Edi- 
tion. Portrait.  Lon- 
don, 1S43.     Svo. 

The  edition  was  also 
issued  in  two  volumes. 

1845.  Essays  of  Elia  (The). 
[Library  of  Choice 
Reading.]  New  York, 
Wiley  &  Putnam, 
1S45.     2  vols.  i2mo. 

1S47. The   Same.     [Both 

Series.]  London, 
1847.      i2mo. 

1849.  The  Same.     [Both 

Series.]  London, 
1S49.      i2mo. 

1S52. The   Same.     [Both 

Series.]  New  York, 
1852.      i2mo. 

1853. The  Same.   In  Two 

Volumes.  A  New 
Edition.  [Portrait.] 
London,  1853.  2  vols. 
i6mo. 


1865.  The     Same.     New 

Edition.  New  York, 
Widdleton  ,  1865. 
Svo. 

1S67.  The  Same.    A  New 

Edition,  with  a  Dedi- 
cation and  Preface 
hitherto  unpublished, 
and  a  few  Reminis- 
cences by  E.  Oliver. 
London,  J.  C.  Hot- 
ten,  1867.     Svo. 

1S67.  The  Same.  Lon- 
don, Moxon,  1867. 
l2mo. 

1867.  Essays  of  Eha,  and  Eli- 
ana  (The),  with  a 
Biographical  Essay  by 
H.  S.  London,  1S67. 
i2mo. 

Bohn's    Standard    Li- 
brary. 

1872.  Another       edition. 

London,    1S72.      Svo. 

1S7S.  Essays  of  Elia.  [Vest- 
Pocket  Series.]  Bos- 
ton,  187S.     32mo. 

1879.  Essays  of  Elia,  and  Eli- 
ana,  with  a  memoir  by 
Barry  Cornwall  [B. 
W.  Procter].  Lon- 
don, George  Bell  & 
Sons,  1879.  2  vols. 
iSmo. 

1879.  [Eha.]  Twenty  Se- 
lected Essays  by  G. 
H.  Greene.  London, 
1879.     Svo. 

1879.  The  Same.   [Handy 

Volume  Series.]  N. 
Y.,  Appleton,  1S79, 
i6mo. 

18S3.  The  Same,  with  In- 
troduction and  Notes 
by     Alfred      Ainger. 


Bibliography. 


>75 


1884. 
1885. 
1885. 


1886. 

1SS6. 

1SS7. 
1S88, 


London,  Macmillan  & 
Co.,  18S3.     i2mo. 

Reprinted  1884-1387, 
[with  corrections  and 
additions],  18S8. 

Essays  of  Elia,  by 
Charles  Lamb.  [Il- 
lustrated with  etch- 
ings by  R.  Swain  Gif- 
ford,  James  D.  Smil- 
lie,  Charles  A.  Piatt, 
F.  S.  Church.]  [Is- 
lington Edition.]  New 
York,  1883.      4to. 

Tliis  edition  was  lim- 
ited to  250  copies. 

The  Same,  reissued 

on  thinner  paper. 
1SS4. 

Another       edition. 

[Illustrated.]  Edin- 
burgh, 18S5.     Svo. 

Essays  of  Elia  and  Other 
Pieces,  with  an  Intro- 
duction by  Henry 
Morley.  [Morley's 
Universal  Library.] 
London,  18S5.  i2mo. 
The  notes  are  by 
Charles  Kent. 

[Elia.]  Some  Essays 
of  Elia  [with  illustra- 
tions by  C.  O.  Mur- 
ray]. London,  1886. 
8vo. 

Essays  of  Elia,  etc., 
with  a  preface  by  H. 
R.  Haweis.  London, 
1886.     Square   i6mo. 

The  Same.  Lon- 
don, 1887. 

The  Same.      188S. 

Essays  of  Elia  (The), 
edited  bv  Augustine 
Birrell     [with      etch- 


ings by  Herbert  Rail- 
ton.  [The  Temple 
Library].  London,  ]. 
M.  Dent  &  Co.,  1888. 
2  vols.     24mo. 

This  edition  was  also 
made  in  Large  Paper. 

1S89.  Essays  of  Elia  (The) 
[Illustrated  from  Pho- 
tographs taken  by 
Walter  Collett.]  Lon- 
don, David  Stott, 
18S9.     32mo. 

This  was  made  also  in 
Large  Paper,  only  100 
copies  printed. 

1802.  John  Woodvil.  A  Tra- 
o-edy  ;  to  which  are 
added  Fragments  of 
Burton,  the  author 
of  the  Anatomy  of 
Melancholy.  London, 
1802.     i6mo. 

The  First  Edition,  in- 
corporated in  the  Works 
thereafter. 


1807.  Mrs.  Leicester's  School; 
or,  the  History  of 
Several  Young  Ladies 
related  by  themselves. 
London,  1S07. 
The  First  Edition. 

1809.  Mrs.  Leicester's  School  ; 

or,  the  History  of 
Several  Young  Ladies 
related  by  themselves. 
The  Second  Edition. 
London,  1809.  i6mo. 
The  Second    Edition. 

1 8 10,  Mrs.  Leicester's  School  ; 

or,  the  History  of 
Several  Young  Ladies 
related  by  themselves. 
Third  Edition.  [Fron- 


170 


Bibliography. 


tispiece.]  London, 
iSio.      i6mo. 

The  Third  Edition. 

1814.  The  Same.  Lon- 
don. 1S14. 

The   Fourth    Edition. 

1S25.  Mrs.  Leicester's  School  ; 
or,  the  History  of 
Several  Young  Ladies 
related  by  themselves. 
Ninth  Edition.  [Fron- 
tispiece by  Harvey.] 
London,  1825.    i2mo. 

1827.  Mrs.  Leicester's  School  ; 
or,  the  History  of 
Several  Young  Ladies 
related  by  themselves. 
Tenth  Edition.  Lon- 
don,   1827. 

1S36. Another        edition. 

London,  1836.  Post 
8vo. 

1844. Another        edition. 

London,  1844.   i2mo. 

1S55. Another       edition. 

London,    1855. 

1881.  Another       edition, 

with  illustrations. 
London,  18S1.     Svo. 

1884.  Mrs.  Leicester's  School, 

etc.  New  Edition. 
London,  1S84.    i2mo. 

1885.  Mrs.   Leicester's  School 

and  other  writings 
in  Prose  and  Verse, 
by  Charles  Lamb, 
with  Introduction  and 
Notes  by  Alfred  Ain- 
ger.  London,  1885. 
i2mo. 
iSog.  Poetry  for  Children. 
Entirely  original,  by 
the  author  of  "  Mrs. 
Leicester's  School." 
In  two  volumes.  Lon- 


don.   i8og.      2   vols. 
i2mo. 
The  First  Edition. 
1 812.    Poetry      for      Children. 
Entirely   original,    by 
the  author  of  "  Mrs. 
Leicester's     School."' 
Boston,     West      and 
Richardson,  and  Ed- 
ward   Cotton,     1S12. 
The  first  copy  known, 
and   the    first  American 
reprint. 

1S72.  Poetry  for  Children,  by 
Charles  and  Mary 
Lamb.  Edited  and 
prefaced  by  Richard 
Heme  Shepherd. 
London,  1872.   i6mo. 

1877.  Poetry  for  Children,  by 
Charles  and  Mary 
Lamb.  To  which  are 
added  "  Prince  Do- 
rus,"  and  some  un- 
collected Poems  by 
Charles  Lamb.  Ed- 
ited, Prefaced,  and 
Annotated  by  Rich- 
ard Heme  Shepherd. 
London,  Chatto  & 
Windus,  1877.  i2mo. 

1877.  The  Same.  Re- 
printed. New  York, 
1877,  Charles  Scrib- 
ner's  Sons.      i6mo. 

18S9.  Poetry  for  Children,  by 
Charles  and  Mary 
Lamb.  To  which  are 
added  "  Prince  Do- 
rus,"  and  some  un- 
collected Poems  by 
Charles  Lamb.  Ed- 
ited, Prefaced,  and 
Annotated    by    Rich- 


Bibliography. 


177 


ard  Heme  Sliepherd. 
New  York,  1S89. 
i6mo. 

An    exact    reprint    of 
the  edition  of  1877. 

iSri.  [?]  Prince  Dorus ;  or, 
P'lattery  put  out  of 
Countenance.  A  Po- 
etical version  of  an 
Ancient  Tale.  Illus- 
trated with  a  series  of 
Elegant  Engravings. 
London,  iSii.  i2mo. 
The  First  Edition. 

1877.  [Prince  Dorus.]  Poetry 
for  Children,  by 
Charles  and  Mary 
Lamb.  To  which  are 
added  "  Prince  Do- 
rus," and  some  un- 
collected Poems  by 
Charles  Lamb.  Ed- 
ited, Prefaced,  and 
Annotated  by  Rich- 
ard Heme  Shepherd. 
London,  Chatto  & 
Windus,  1877.    i2mo. 

1889.  Prince  Dorus,  by  Charles 
Lamb.  With  Nine 
Illustrations  in  fac- 
simile (hand-colour- 
ed). London,  Field  & 
Tuer.  1S89.      Svo. 

Only  500  copies 
printed,  each  numbered. 
This  contains  an  In- 
troduction by  A.  W.  T. 
[A.  W.  Tuer],  and  is  an 
exact  facsimile  of  the 
original  edition. 

1S35.  Recollections  of  Christ's 
Hospital,  by  the  late 
Charles  Lamb,  origi- 
nally published  in 
1813,  now  reprinted 
by  some  of  his  school- 


fellows and  friends, 
etc.  London,  1835. 
Svo. 
I  S3 1.  Satan  in  Search  of  a 
Wife  ;  with  the  whole 
process  of  his  Court- 
ship and  Marriage, 
and  who  danced  at  the 
wedding,  by  an  Eye- 
witness. London, 
1831.      i2mo. 

The  First  Edition. 
1808.  Specimens  of  English 
Dramatic  Poets,  who 
lived  about  the  time 
of  Shakespeare,  with 
Notes,  by  Charles 
Lamb.  London,  1808. 
i2mo. 

The  First  Edition. 
1S13.  Specimens  of  English 
Dramatic  Poets,  who 
lived  about  the  time 
of  Shakespeare,  with. 
Notes.  Second  Edi- 
tion. London,  John 
Bum  pus,  1 8 13. 

The  Second  Edition. 

1814.  Specimens  of  English 
Dramatic  Poets,  who 
lived  about  the  time 
of  Shakespeare,  with 
Notes.  London,  1S14, 
Moxon.    2vo]s.  i2mo. 

1S35.  Specimens  of  English 
Dramatic  Poets,  who 
lived  about  the  time 
of  Shakespeare,  with 
Notes.  A  new  edition. 
In  two  volumes. 
London,  1835.    i6mo. 

1S44.  Specimens  of  English 
Dramatic  Poets,  of 
about     the    time     of 


178 


Bibliography. 


Shakespeare,  etc. 
London,  1844.  2  vols. 

1845.  Another     edition. 

New  York,  1845.  2 
vols,  in  I. 

1847.  Specimens  of  English 
Dramatic  Poets,  who 
lived  about  the  time 
of  Shakespeare,  with 
Notes,  by  Charles 
Lamb.  A  new  edition, 
including  the  extracts 
from  the  G  a  r  r  i  c  k 
Plays.  [Bohn's  Anti- 
quarian Library.] 
London,    1847.  i2mo. 

This  edition  contains  a 
short  Prefatory  note  by 
H.  G.  Bohn. 

1852.  The  same,  London, 

1852.    Crown  8vo. 

1854.  Specimens  of  English 
Dramatic  Poets,  etc. 
London,  1854.  Crown 
8vo. 

1854.  Specimens  of  English 
Dramatic  Poets,  etc. 
N.  Y.,  W.  P.  Hazard, 
1854.      l2mo. 

1798.  Tale  of  Rosamund  Gray 
and  Old  Blind  Mar- 
garet (A).  London, 
1798.     i2mo. 

1835.  Tale  of  Rosamund  Gray, 
Recollections  of 
Christ's  Hospital  (A), 
etc.,  etc.  London, 
1835.     8vo. 

1838.  Tale  of  Rosamund  Gray 
and  Old  Blind  Mar- 
garet (A),  etc.  Lon- 
don, 1838.     8vo. 

184I.  Tale  of  Rosamund  Gray 
and  Old    Blind  Mar- 


garet (A).  London, 
1S41.  i2mo. 

Essays,    Letters,    etc. 
[Double  column.] 

1849.  Tale  of  Rosamund  Gray, 
etc.  London,  1849. 
i2mo. 

1S50.  Tale  of  Rosamund  Gray, 
etc.  (Bohn.)  London, 
1S50.      i2mo. 

1S07.  Tales  from  Shakespear, 
designed  for  the  Use 
of  Young  Persons,  by 
Charles  Lamb.  Em- 
bellished with  Copper- 
Plates.  In  two  vol- 
umes. London,  1S07. 
2  vols.  i2mo. 
The  First  Edition. 

1S09.  Tales  from  Shakespear, 
designed  for  the  Use 
of  Young  Persons. 
[20  plates,  engraved 
by  Blake.]  [Portrait 
of  Shakespeare.]  Lon- 
don, 1809.  2  vols. 
i2mo. 
The  Second  Edition. 

iSio.  Another     edition. 

London.  i2mo.  2 
vols. 

1813,  Tales  from  Shakespear, 
designed  for  the  Use 
of  Young  Persons. 
Philadelphia,  Brad- 
ford and  Inskeep, 
1813.      2  vols.    i2mo. 

The    First    American 
Edition. 

1 8 16.  Tales  from  Shakespear. 
designed  for  the  Use 
of  Young  Persons. 
The  Third  Edition. 
[20    plates,  engraved 


Bibliography. 


179 


by    Hlake].      London 
1S16.     2  vols.  i2mo. 

This  edition  contains 
the  "  Advei-tisement  "  to 
the  second ,  but  is  in  other 
respects  a  reprint. 
1S22.  Tales  from  Shakespear, 
designed  for  the  Use 
of  Young  Persons. 
The  Fourth  Edition. 
London,  1S22.  2 
vols.  i2ino. 

The  Fourth  Edition, 
omitting-  the  "  Adver- 
tisement." 
1831.  Tales  from  Shakespeare, 
designed  for  the  Use 
of  Young  Persons 
[with  designs  by  Har- 
vey]. London,  Mox- 
on,  I  S3 1.      i2mo. 

The  Fifth  Edition,  the 
printers  being-  changed 
from  M.  J.  Godwin  to 
Moxon. 

TS37.   Another     edition. 

London,  1837.  i2mo. 
1S38.  Tales  from  Shakespeare, 
designed  for  the  Use 
of  Young  Persons,  by 
Mr.  and  Miss  Lamb. 
Sixth  Edition,  orna- 
mented -with  designs 
by  Harvey.  London, 
Baldwin  and  Cradock, 
1838. 

The  Sixth  Edition. 

1839.  Tales  from  Shakespeare. 
London,  Baldwin 
[Godwin],  1839. 
i2mo. 

1S43,  Tales  from  Shakespeare. 
London,  H,  G.  Bohn, 
1S43.     i2mo. 

1844.   Tales  from  Shakespeare. 

London,        1S44, 

Groombridge.     32mo. 

The    Same.     Lon- 


don,    1844,    Cox.      2 
vols.      i8mo. 
The    Same.      Lon- 
don,    Moxon,     1S44. 
24  mo. 

1846,  Tales  from  Shakespeare, 
with  vocabulary,  com- 
piled by  E.  Amthor. 
Leipsic,  1846.  i6mo. 

1859.  Tales  from  Shakespeare. 
Edited  by  Charles 
Knight.  London, 
1859,    Griffin.    i8mo. 

Reprinted,  London, 
1865.     i2mo. 

1861.  Tales  from  Shakespeare. 
London,  1861,  Bell 
&  Daldy.     24mo. 

1863,  Tales  from  Shakespeare, 

with  woodcuts,  by 
Harvey.  London, 
1S63.      i2mo. 

1864.  Tales  from  Shakespeare. 

New  York,  F.  H. 
Dodd,  1S64.     32mo. 

1864.  Tales  from  Shakespeare. 

New  York,  Hurd  & 
Houghton,  1864. 
i2mo. 

1865.  Tales  from  Shakespeare. 

London,  1865.    i2mo. 

1866.  Another       edition. 

London,    1866.      8vo. 

1867.  Tales  from  Shakespeare. 

London,  Routledge. 
1S67. 

1S73.  Another       edition. 

London,    1S73.     8vo. 

1875.  Tales  from  Shakespeare. 

[Illustrated.  |  L  o  n  - 
don,  1875.     i2mo. 

1876.  Tales  from  Shakespeare. 

London,  Barrett, 
1S76.     Crown  8vo. 


i8o 


Bibliography. 


1877.   Tales  from  Shakespeare. 

[Half -Hour    Series.] 

N.  Y.,   Harper  Bros., 

1877.     32mo. 
1S77.  Tales  from  Shakespeare. 

London,     Lockwood, 

1877.  l2mo. 
1S77.  Tales  from  Shakespeare. 

[Little  Classics.]  Bos- 
ton, Osgood.     i8mo. 

1877.  Tales  from  Shakespeare. 

New  edition.  |  Illus- 
trated by  Gilbert.] 
London.  1S77.   ifimo. 

1878.  Tales  from  Shakespeare. 

[Illustrated.]     Lon- 
don,   1S7S,   Ch.atto  & 
Windus.     4to. 
1878.  Tales  from  Shakespeare. 
London,  Warne,  1S78. 

1878.  Tales  from  Shakespeare. 

With  twelve  illustra- 
tions in  permanent 
photography  from  the 
Boydell  Gallery.  Lon- 
don,  Bickers  &    Son, 

1878.  Crown  8vo. 
1S79.   Tales  from  Shakespeare. 

London,  1879.  2  vols. 
i2mo. 

1879.  Tales  from  Shakespeare. 

London,     Whittaker, 

1879.  32mo. 
1879.  Tales  from  Shakespeare, 

by  Charles  and  Mary 
Lamb.  Edited,  with 
an  Introduction,  by 
Alfred  Ainger.  Lon- 
don, Macmillan  & 
Co.  [Golden  Treas- 
ury Series.]     i6mo. 

Reprinted,  1883,   1886, 
in  i2mo. 

— —  Another  edition, 
don,  1SS7. 


1879.  Another       edition. 

London,  1879.     4to. 

18S1.  Tales  from  Shakespeare. 
[Colored  Plates.] 
London,  Routledge, 
1881.      i2mo. 

iSSi.  Tales  from  Shakespeare. 
[Illustrated  Chandos 
Classics.]  London, 
Warne,  1881.     i2mo. 

1882.  Tales  from  Shakespeare. 
[Illustrated  by  Gil- 
bert.] London,  1S82, 
Routledge.     4to. 

18S3.  Tales  from  Shakespeare. 
Edited  by  Ainger. 
London,  1883.    i2mo. 

18S3.  Another       edition. 

Edited  by  Alfred 
Ainger.  [Cilobe  Read- 
ings.] London, 1S83. 
i2mo. 

18S5.  Tales  from  Shakespeare, 
designed  for  the  Use  of 
Young  Persons.  i6th 
Edition.  [With  steel 
Portrait.  Engravings 
by  Harvey]  London. 
1SS5.  Lockwood. 
i2mo. 

Another        edition. 

[Routledge's  World 
Library.]  1SS6.  i6mo. 
Tales  from  Shakespeare, 
by  Charles  and  Mary 
Lamb.  [Chiswick  Se- 
ries.] London,  18S8. 
iSmo. 

Another       edition. 

,  1886,  1  Edited  by  A.   Gardi- 

I  ner.     [H  e  y  w  o  o  d  '  s 

Lon- 1  Literary  Readers.] 

London,  1S88.     8vo. 


18S6, 


18S8. 


Bibliography. 


I8i 


VII.    LETTERS. 


1837.  The  Letters  of  Charles 
Lamb,  with  a  Sketch  of  his 
Life,  by  Thomas  Noon  Tal- 
fourd,  one  of  his  executors. 
In  two  volumes.  [Portraits.] 
London,  Edward  Moxon,  1837. 
2  vols.  8vo. 

The  Letters  in  this  edition  are 
not  published  entire.  A  mis- 
taken scrupulousness  prompted 
the  omission  of  much. 

1848.  The  Final  Memorials 
of  Charles  Lamb  :  consisting 
chiefly  of  his  Letters  not  be- 
fore published,  with  Sketches 
by  some  of  his  contemporaries, 
by  Thomas  Noon  Talfourd, 
one  of  his  executors.  In  two 
volumes.  London,  Edward 
Moxon,  1S4S. 

Not  published  until  after  Mary's 
death.  The  first  full-lengfth 
portrait  of  Lamb  the  public 
had  obtained. 

1849.   Another  edition. 

London,  Moxon,  1849.     i2mo. 

Another  Edition.      Ap- 

pleton,     New    York.        1849. 
i2mo. 

1850.   Another  edition. 

London,  1850.     i2mo. 

1854.  The  Same.     Life 

and  Letters,  etc.,  etc.      Phila- 


delphia. W.   P.   Hazard,  1854. 
iimo. 

1886.   Letters     of     Charles 
Lamb,   with   some  account    of 
the  writer,  his  friends  and  cor- 
respondents,   and    explanatory 
notes,  by  the  late  Sir  Thomas 
Noon  Talfourd,  one  of  his  ex- 
ecutors.    An  entirely  new  edi- 
tion.      Carefully    revised    and 
greatly  enlarged  by  W.  Carew 
Hazlitt.     London,  George  Bell 
&  Sons,  1886.     2  vols.      i2mo. 
Printed  in  Bohn   Library.    This 
edition      contains      Talfourd's 
original  prefaces,  and  gives  the 
Letters  in  full  but  rearranged, 
with     additions,    freely    inter- 
spersed  with   original    matter. 
They  are  also  arranged  chrono- 
logically. 

1888.  The  Letters  of  Charles 
Lamb,  newly  arranged,  with 
additions,  edited,  with  Intro- 
ductions and  Notes,  by  Alfred 
Ainger.  [Portrait.]  London, 
Macmillan  &  Co.,  1S88.  2  vols. 
l2mo. 

The  recension  of  the  Manning 
and  Barton  correspondence,  a 
set  of  letters  to  Dibdin,  a  letter 
to  Chambers  and  Dodwell,  and 
a  complete  chronological  ar- 
rangement of  the  Letters  are 
the  chief  features  of  this,  by  all 
means,  best  edition. 


182 


Bibliography. 


VIII.    POETICAL   WORKS. 


1836.  The  Poetical  Works  of 
Charles  Lamb.  Anew  edition. 
London,  Edward  Moxon,  1S36. 
Svo. 

The  first  edition  in  separate  form. 
Those  in  itahcs  are  by  Mary. 
Contents  :  Poems,  Sonnets, 
Blank  Verse,  Album  Verses. 

1838.   The  Poetical  Works  of 

Charles  Lamb.    Third  Edition. 

London,  Moxon,  1838.    i6mo. 

An  exact  reprint  of  the  edition  of 


1839.  — 
don,  1839. 


-  The  Same.    Lon- 
Medium  Svo. 


1840.  The  Same.  Lon- 
don, 1840.     i2mo. 

1842.  The  Same.  Lon- 
don, Bohn,  1842.      i2mo. 

1849. The  Same.  Lon- 
don,  1848.     8vo. 

1852.  The  Same.  Phila- 
delphia, 1852.     8vo. 

1884.  Poems,  Plays,  and 
Miscellaneous  Ussays,  with 
Notes  and  Introduction  by 
Alfred  Ainger.  London,  Mac- 
millan  &  Co.,  1884.      i2mo. 


IX.  LAMBIANA. 


BIOGRAPHY,   CRITICISMS,   ETC. 


Ainger  (Alfred).  Charles  Lamb 
[English  Men  of  Let- 
ters Series].  London, 
1882.      i6mo. 

Ainger  (Alfred).  Charles  Lamb. 
London,  18S8.    i2mo. 

Rewritten  and   enlarged 
from  the  former  work. 


AIlibone(S.  A.) 
tionary 


Allsop 


Critical  Dic- 
of      English 

Literature  and  British 

and  American  authors. 

Philadelphia,        1870. 

3  vols.      Svo. 

Vol.  II.  Article  :  Charles 
Lamb. 

(Thomas).  Letters, 
Conversations,  and 
Recollections  of  S.  T. 


Coleridge.      London, 
1836.     2  vols.  i2mo. 

This  contains  many 
items  of  interest  con- 
cerning Lamb. 

American  Cyclopedia    (Apple- 
ton's).       New    York, 
1873.      16  vols.     Svo. 
Article  :  Charles  Lamb. 
Babson  (J.  E.).   Eliana  :  being 
the     hitherto     uncol- 
lected     writings      of 
Charles  Lamb.     New 
York      and      Boston, 
1865.     i2mo. 
Contents  :    Preface,    Es- 
says and  Sketches,  The 
Pawnbroker's  Daugh- 
ter. The  Adventures  of 
Ulysses,  Tales,  Poems, 


Bibliography. 


183 


Letters,  etc.  This  was  a 
valuable  addition  to  the 
knowledge  of  Lamb. 

Balmanno    (Mary).      Pen    and 
Pencil.     New     York, 
1858.  .Square  Svo. 
Pp.  121-146. 

Barton  (Bernard).  Memoirs, 
Letters,  and  Poems 
of.  Edited  by  his 
daughter.  Philadel- 
phia, 1856.      i2nio. 

Charles  Lamb,  pp.  168  - 
184. 

Bates  (William).  The  Maclise 
Portrait  Gallery  of 
"  Illustriou.s  Literary 
Characters,"  with 
Memoirs,  etc.  Lon- 
don, 1883.  Svo. 
Charles  Lamb,  pp.  290- 
300. 

[Birrell  (Augustine).]  Obiter 
Dicta.  [Second  Se- 
ries.] London,  1887. 
i2mo. 

Charles  Lamb,  pp.  222- 
236.  A  review  of 
"Works"  reprinted 
from  Maonillans 

Magazine. 

Blessington  (Countess  of).  The 
Literary  Life  and 
Correspondence  of. 
Edited  by  R.  R.  Mad- 
den, London,  1855. 
3  vols.     Svo. 

Vol.  IL  p.  369  ;  Vol.  in. 
p.  176. 

Brie  a  Brae  Series  [edited  by 
R.  H.  Stoddard]. 
Personal  Recollec- 
tions of  Lamb,  Haz- 
litt,  and  others.  New 
York,  1875.  i2mo. 
Introductory  Preface,  p. 
1-47. 


Buhver-Lytton  (E.  L.).  Prose 
Works.  London, 

iS63.      3  vols.    i2mo. 
Vol.  I.  pp.  S9-123. 

Calvert     (George     IL).       The 
Gentleman.      Boston, 
1S61.   i2mo. 
Pp.  32-42. 

Carlyle  (Thomas).  A  History 
of  the  First  Forty 
Years  of  his  Life, 
1795-1S35.  By  J. 
A.  Froude.  London, 
1882.     2  vols.     Svo. 

Vol.  I.  p.  222 ;  Vol.  II. 
pp.   iog,  2IO. 

Chambers's       Cyclopedia      of 
English      Literature. 
London,  1876.   2  vols. 
Svo. 
Vol.  II.  pp.  90-95. 

Chambers's  Encyclopedia,  etc. 
Revised  Edition.   Ed- 
inburgh, 1882.     Svo. 
Article  :  Charles  Lamb. 

Chorley  (H.  F.).  The  Authors 
of  England.  A  series 
of  Medallion  Por- 
traits, etc.  London, 
1S38.  4to. 
Charles  Lamb. 

Clarke  (Charles  and  Mary 
Cowden).  Recollec- 
tions of  Writers,  with 
Letters.  New  York, 
1S78.    i2mo. 

Charles  Lamb  and  his 
Letters— Mary  Lamb, 
pp.  158-189. 

Clarke  (F.  L.).  Golden  Friend- 
ships, etc.  London, 
18S4.    Svo. 

Lamb  and  Coleridge,  pp. 

i6o-iS8. 


i84 


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Clayden  (P.  W.).   Rogers    and 
his      Contemporaries. 
London,  i8S6.  2  vols. 
Crown  8vo. 
Vol.  I.  p.  350. 

Coleridge  (S.  T.).  Life  of,  by 
Hall  Caine  [Great 
Writers'  Series.]  Lon- 
don, 1887.  8vo. 
Numerous  references  to 
Charles  Lamb. 

Collins     (Stephen).    Autobiog- 
raphy   and    Miscella- 
nies.        Philadelphia, 
1S72.      i2mo. 
P-39- 

Cottle  (Joseph).  Reminiscences 
of  Samuel  Taylor 
Coleridge  and  Robert 
Southey.  London, 
1847.  i2mo. 
Frequent  mention  of 
Lamb. 

Craddock    (Thomas).     Charles 
Lamb.  Liverpool. 

1867.    i2mo. 

Craik     (G.    L.).  Compendious 
History     of     English 
Literature,  &c.    New 
York,  1875.     i2mo. 
Vol.  n.  pp.  478,  534,  553, 

554.  555- 

Cunningham  (Allan).  Bio- 
graphical and  Critical 
History  of  the  Liter- 
ature of  the  last  Fifty 
Years.  [Waldie's  Li- 
brary, Vol.  HL]  Phil- 
adelphia, 1833-1S49. 
12  vols.  i6mo. 
Daniel  (George).  Love's  Last 
Labor  not  Lost.  Lon- 
don. 1S63.  i6mo. 
Recollections      of 

Charles      Lamb,     pp. 

1-31- 


De    Quincey  (Thomas).     Bio- 
graphical   Essays. 
1851.     i2mo. 
Pp  167-228. 

Literary    Reminiscences. 

Boston,  1S52.    2  vols. 

i2mo. 

Vol.  1.  pp.  62-135. 

EUiston  (R.  W.).  The  Life 
and  Enterprise  of. 
By  George  Raymond. 
London,  1S57.  i2mo. 
Pp.  266.  etc. 

Encyclopedia  Britannica.  The 
Encyclopedia  Britan- 
nica. Eighth  Edi- 
tion .  Edinburgh, 
1856.     4to. 

Article:  Lamb,  by  R. 
Carruthers. 

The  Same.     Ninth  Edi- 

t  i  o  n  .  Edinburgh, 
1876.  4to. 
Article  :  Charles  Lamb. 
English  Cyclopedia.  A  new 
Dictionary  of  Uni- 
versal Knowledge. 
(Charles  Knight's.) 
Article :    Charles  Lamb. 

English  Poets  (The).  Selec- 
tions, with  Critical 
Introductions,  etc. 
[Edited  by  T.  H. 
Ward.]  London, 
iSSq.    4  vols.     i2mo. 

Charles  Lamb,  Vol.  IV. 

pp.  326-333. 

Fields  (James  T.).  Yester- 
days with  Authors. 
Boston,  1871.     i2mo. 

The  Article  :  "Barry 
Cornwall  and  some  of 
his  Friends,"  contains 
numerous  references 
to  Lamb  and  his  sister. 


Bibliography. 


185 


Fitzgerald  (Percy).    Afternoon 
Lectures.    Second  Se- 
ries.    London,    1S64. 
i2mo. 
Vol.  II.  pp.  67-101. 

Art  of  the  Stage  (The), 

as  set  out  in  Lamb's 
Dramatic  Essays,  with 
a  Commentary.  Lon- 
don, 1SS5.      i2mo. 

Charles      Lamb  :       His 

Friends,  his  Haunts, 
and  his  Books.     [Por- 
traits.] London,  1866. 
.^  Square  l2mo. 

■ Little   Essays,   Sketches, 

and  Characters,  by 
C.  L.  Selected  from 
his  Letters.  London, 
1SS4.      i2mo. 

Recreations    of    a    Lon- 

don    Literary     Man. 

London,  18S2.  2  vols. 

i2mo. 

Vol.  I.  p.  235. 

Fox  (Caroline).  Memoirs  of 
Old  Friends,  etc., 
1S35-1S71.  Edited  by 
H.  N.  Pym.  Lon- 
don, 1S82.  Svo. 
Mentions  Lamb,  pp.  12, 
19,  46,  52,  145. 

Francis   (John).      Literary 
Chronicle   of   a  Half 
Century.    London, 
i832.     2  vols.   i2mo. 
Frequent      mention      of 
Lamb  and  his  connec- 
tion   with     The  Athe- 
ncezim. 

Gilchrist  (Mrs.).  Mary  Lamb. 
[Famous  Women  Se- 
ries.] i6mo.  Lon- 
don, W.  H.  Allen, 
1883.  i6mo. 
Numerous  mention  of 
her  brother. 


Vol.     I.     pp. 
Sketch  of  Lamb,  with 


Gilfillan  (George).  A  Gallery 
of  Literary  Portraits. 
London,  1845-54.  3 
vols.     i2mo. 

338-345 
of  Lam 
Portrait 

Godwin  (William).  His 
Friends  and  Ac- 
quaintances. By  C. 
Kegan  Paul.  Lon- 
don, 1876.  2  vols. 
Svo. 

Vol.  I.,  p.  362;  Vol.  II., 
p.  321. 

Hall  (S.  C).  Retrospect  of 
a  Long  Life.  From 
1S15  to  1S83.  Lon- 
don, 1S83.  2  vols. 
8vo. 

Vol.  II.  contains  Anec- 
dotes, etc.,  of  Lamb. 

Hall  (Mr.  and  Mrs.  S.  C). 
Memories  of  Great 
Men  and  Women. 
London,  1S76.  8vo. 
P.  II. 

Haydon  (B.  R.).  Life  of. 
Edited  by  Tom  Tay- 
lor. London,  1853. 
3  vols.    i2mo. 

Numerous  references  to 
Lamb. 

Hazlitt  (W.  Carew).  Mary 
and  Charles  Lamb. 
Poems,  Letters,  and 
Remains.  Now  first 
collected.  With  Rem- 
iniscences and  Notes. 
Portraits,  P'ac-similes, 
and  Illustrations. 
London,  1874.     4to. 

Unusually  interesting 
and  important,  con- 
taining matter  not  in 


Bibliography. 


any  of  the  earlier  edi- 
tions. Issued  also  in 
8vo. 

Spirit  of    the    Age  ;    or, 

Contemporary      Por- 
traits.  London,  1825. 
i2mo. 
Pp.  395-405- 

Table   Talk.       London, 

1845-6.  2  vols. 
i6mo. 

Vol.  II.  On  Conversation 
of  Authors. 

Memoirs.       With      Por- 

tions of  his  Corre- 
spondence. By  W.  C. 
Hazlitt.  London, 
1867.  2  vols.  i2mo. 
References  to  Lamb- 

Literary    Remains.       By 

his  Son.  London, 
1836.  2  vols.  i2mo. 
References  to  C.  L. 

Hood  (Thomas).  Memorials.by 
his  Daughter.  Lon- 
don, i860.  2  vols. 
i2mo. 

Howitt  (William).   The  North- 
ern Heights  of   Lon- 
don.     London,   1869. 
8vo. 
Pp.  882-885. 

Hunt  (Leigh).  Lord  Byron 
and  Some  of  his 
Contemporaries,  etc. 
London,  1828.     4to. 

Charles  Lamb,  pp.  296, 
299.   [With  Portrait  by- 
Meyer.] 
—■ —  Autobiography.       W  i  th 
Reminiscences         o  f 
Friends  and  Contem- 
poraries.        London, 
1850.     3  vols.    i2mo. 
Numerous  references  to 
Lamb. 


Hution  (Laurence).      Literary 
I>andmarks   of    Lon- 
don.     Boston,    1885. 
i2mo. 
Pp.   182-193.    The   most 

accurate    account    e.\- 

tant. 

Imperial  Dictionary  of  Univer- 
sal   Biography  (The). 
Glasgow,  n.d.      8vo. 
Vol.     III.     Article: 
Charles   Lamb,  by 
Charles  Taylor. 

Imitation  of  Celebrated  Au- 
thors ;  or,  Imaginary 
Rejected  Articles. 
London,  1844.  l2mo. 
P.  30  contains  imitation 
of  Lamb. 

Ireland  (Alexander).  List  of 
the  writings  of  Wil- 
liam Hazlitt  and 
Leigh  Hunt,  etc., pre- 
ceded by  a  review  of, 
and  extracts  from  Bar- 
ry Cornwall's  "  Me- 
morials of  Charles 
Lamb,"  etc.,  and  a 
chronological  list  of 
the  works  of  Charles 
Lamb.  London  : 

186S.      i2mo. 
Pp.  3-26.   Charles  Lamb. 

Jesse  (J.  Heneage).  London, 
its  celebrities,  charac- 
ters, and  remarkable 
places.  London,  1851. 
3  vols.  i2mo. 
Vol.  I.  pp.  330,  345,  388; 

Vol.  in.  pp.  220,  228, 
313- 

Johnson's  Universal  Cyclo- 
paedia, etc.  New 
York,  1S86.  2  vols. 
8vo. 

Article.     Charles  Lamb. 
P.  C.  Bliss. 


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187 


Mathews  (William).  The  Great 
Conversers  and  other 
Essays.      Chicago, 
1S76.      t2mo. 
Pp.  32,  117,  165,  173. 

Macmillan  (Daniel).  Memoirs 
of  By      Thomas 

Hughes.         London, 
1822.      i2mo. 
P.  141. 

Mathews  (Charles).  Life  and 
Correspondence,  etc. 
Edited  by  his  Widow. 
London,  1838.  4  vols. 
8vo. 

Numerous   references  to 
Lamb. 

Minto  (William),   A  Manual  of 
English   Prose    Liter- 
ature,   etc.     London, 
1886.     i2mo. 
Pp-  537>  539- 

Moir(D.  M.),  Sketches  of  the 
Poetical  Literature  of 
the  past  Half  Cent- 
ury. Edinburgh, 
1S51.  i6mo. 
Moore  (Thomas).  Journal  and 
Correspondence.  Ed- 
ited by  Lord  John 
Russell.  London, 
1853.  8  vols.  8vo. 
Lamb    Anecdotes,    etc., 

Vol.  in.  p.  136;  Vol. 

IV.  pp.  50,  51  :  Vol.  V. 

p.  317 ;  Vol.  VI.  p.  249. 

Munden  (J.  S.).  Memoirs  of. 
By  his  Son.  London, 
1S44.     Svo. 

Refers  to  Charles  Lamb. 

Mylius  (W.  F.).  The  First 
Book  of  Poetry  for 
the   Use  of   Schools, 


etc.      London,    1S15. 
i6mo. 

This  contains  selections 
from  ■'  Poetry  for 
Children." 

Notes  and  Queries.  General 
Lidex  to  Notes  and 
Queries.  Seven  Series. 
London,  1856,  iSgo. 
4to. 

Numerous  references  to 
Lamb. 

Oliphant        (Mrs.).  Literary 

History  of  England. 

London,  1S89.      3 
vols.   8vo. 

Vol.  I.  pp.  230,  250;  Vol. 
II.  pp.  65,  176,  177,  250, 
etc.  ;  Vol.  III.  I,  7,240. 

Pater  (W.  H.).  Appreciations, 
with  an  Essay  on 
Style.  London,  1889. 
I2mo. 

Pp.  107-126,  Charles 
Lamb. 

Patmore  (P.  G  ).       My  Friends 

and       Acquaintances. 

London,  1884.  4  vols. 

l2mo. 

Numerous  and  most  im- 
portant references  to, 
and  reminiscences  of 
Lamb. 

[Patmore  (P.   G.).]      Rejected 
Articles.     London, 
1826.      i2mo. 
Contains      imitation     of 
Lamb. 

Pen  and  Ink  Sketches  of  Poets, 
Preachers,  and  Politi- 
cians. [By  John  Dix.] 
London,  1846.  8vo. 
Lamb  and  Coleridge,  pp. 
122,  140. 

Penny     Cyclopaedia     (The). 


Bibliography. 


[Chas.  Knight's.] 
London,  1839.     8vo. 

Vol.  XIII.  Article  : 
Charles  Lamb. 

Personal  Traits  of  British  Au- 
thors —  Wordsworth, 
Coleridge,  Lamb, 

Hazlitt,  Leigh  Hunt, 
Procter.  Edited  by 
E.  T.  Mason.  New 
York,  18S5.      i2mo. 

Pp.  113-173.  Charles 
Lamb. 

Poole  (Thomas).  Thomas  Poole 
and  his  Friend.  By 
Mrs.  Sandford.  Lon- 
don, 18SS.  i2mo. 
2    vols.    Svo. 

Numerous  references  to 
Charles  Lamb. 

Procter  (B.W.).  Charles  Lamb. 
A  Memoir,  by  Barry 
Cornwall.  London, 
1868.     Svo. 

This  contains  portraits 
theretofore  unknown. 

Robinson  (Henry  Crabb). 
Diary,  Reminiscences, 
and  Correspondence, 
selected  and  edited  by 
Thomas  Sadler.  Lon- 
don, 1S66.  3  vols. 
Svo. 

This  is  crowded  with 
references  to  Lamb 
and  his  sister. 

Russell  (W.  Clark).  The  Book 
of  Authors.  London, 
1876.     8vo. 

Pp.  71,  105,  144,  204,  392, 
399,  427,  447. 

St.  Albans  (Duchess  of).  Me- 
moirs of  Miss  Mellon, 
by    Mrs.    C.    Barron- 


Wilson.  London, 

1840.     2  vols.     i2mo. 

Account  of  the  produc- 
tion of  •■  Mr.  H."— a 
Farce.    Vol  I.  p.  296. 

Shaw  (Thomas   B.).    Complete 
Manual     of     English 
Literature,  etc.     New 
York,  1S67.     i2mo. 
Pp.  470-472. 

Southey  (Robert).  Life  and 
Correspondence.  Ed- 
ited byC.  C.  Southey. 
London,  1850.  6  vols. 
Svo. 

Many  references  to 
Lamb. 

Swinburne  (A.  C).     "William 
Blake,"  a  critical   Es- 
say.    Ijondon,    i863. 
Svo. 
P.  8. 

Miscellanies.         London, 

1SS6.  i2mo. 
Charles  Lamb  and 
George  Wither,  pp. 
152-200.  Originally 
published  in  the  Nitie- 
teenth  Century. 

Taine,  H.  A.  History  of  Eng- 
lish Literature.  Trans- 
lated by  H.  Van  Laun. 
London,  1886.  4  vols. 
Svo. 

Charles  Lamb,  Vol.  III. 
pp.  423-427. 

Thompson  (Mrs.  K.  B.).   Cele- 
brated     Friendships. 
London,  1881.   2  vols. 
i2mo. 
Vol.  II.  pp.  53-98. 

Ticknor  (George).  Life,  Let- 
ters, and  Journals  of. 
[Edited  by  G.  S.  Hil- 
liard,  George  Still- 
man  ,    and     others.] 


Bibliography. 


189 


Boston,  1876.    2  vols. 

8vo. 

Vol.  I.  p.  294,  contains  a 
curious  account  of  an 
evening  with  Lamb. 

Timbs  (J.).  Anecdote  Lives 
of  the  Later  Wits  and 
Humourists.  L  o  n  - 
don,  1S74.  2  vols. 
i2mo. 

VoL  I.  contains  numer- 
ous allusions,  etc.,  to 
Lamb. 

Trollope  (Wm.).  A  History 
of  the  Royal  Founda- 
tion of  Christ's  Hos- 
pital, with  an  account 
of  the  plan  of  educa- 
tion, etc. ,  and  Me- 
moirs of  Eminent 
Blues,  etc.  London, 
1834.  4to. 
Numerous  references  to 
Lamb. 

Tuckerman  (H.  T.).  Charac- 
teristics of  Literature, 
thirst  Series.  Phila- 
delphia, 1849.    i2mo. 

Pp.  130,  170.  Charles 
Lamb,  the  Humourist. 

Universal  Pronouncing:  Diction- 


ary of  Biography  and 

Mythology.      [Edited 

by  Joseph    Thomas.] 

Philadelphia,       1S89. 

4to. 

Article:   Charles  Lamb. 

Wainewright  (Thomas  Grif- 
fiths). Essays  and 
Criticisms.  Now  first 
collected,  with  some 
account  of  the  author, 
by  W.  C.  Hazlitt. 
London,  iSSo.    i2mo. 

Numerous  references  to 
Lamb. 

Wilson  (John).     Noctes    Am' 
brosianii;.  New  York, 
1863.      5  vols.      Svo. 
Vol.  L  pp.  170.  224  ;  Vol. 

n.  p.  106. 

Willis  (N.  P.).     Pencillings  by 

the  Way.    New  York. 

1853.      i2mo. 
Wordsworth  (Williamj.      Life, 

by   William    Knight. 

Edinburgh,    1S89.     3 

vols.    Svo. 

Full     of    references     to 
Charles  Lamb. 


MAGAZINE    ARTICLES. 


Lamb  (Charles").  Overland  I 
Monthlv{^.  S.),  Vol.  IV.  p. 
284,  H.  Colbach.  —  The 
Acadeviy,  Vol.  XXL  p.  16S, 
R.  C.  Browne. —  The  Athe- 
ncnim.  Vol.  H.  p.  566  (iS36), 
A.  Ainger. — Eclectic  Maga- 
zine, Vol.  XXHL  p.  491  ; 
Vol.  XXXI. p.  399. — Fraser's 
,  Magazine,   Vol.    LXXV.    p. 


657,  G.  Massey. — Living As.e 
(Littell's),  Vol.  L.  p.  145  ; 
Vol.  LXI.  p.  -n\.— Monthly 
Review,  Vol.  XC.  p.  253  ; 
Vol.  CXXXVIIL  p.  no; 
Vol.  CXLIII.  p.  467-  — 
Modern  Review,  Vol.  C.  pp. 
1-202. — Methodist  Quarterly 
Review.  Vol.  XVIII.  p.  566, 
W.  H.  Barnes. — Macinillan's 


iqo 


Bibliographv. 


Magazine,  Vol.  XXIX.  p. 
431,  A.  Black. — iVew  Eng- 
land Magazine,  Vol.  IX.  p. 
233. — People's  Journal,  Vol. 
XI.  p.  "iyj.— Pioneer  {The), 
Vol.  II.  p.  144,  C.  H.  Wash- 
burn. —  Southern  Literary 
Messenger,  Vol.  VI.  p.  652. 
—  Sharpens  London  Maga- 
zine, Vol.  XXVIII.  p.  239. 
— All  the  Year  Pound,  Vol. 
XXXV,  p.  275.  —  Canada 
Monthly,  Vol.  XVII.  p.  350, 
J.  C.  hnwc^n.— Dial  {The) 
[Chicago],  Vol.  IX.  p.  38, 
E.  G.  Johnson. — Every  Sat- 
urday, Vol.  XII.  p.  292. — 
Gentleman  s  Magazine  (N. 
S.),  Vol.  XLI.  p.  55,  W. 
Summers. — Hogg's  Weekly 
Lnstructor,  Vol.  XI.  p.  145. 
Tail's  Edinburgh  Magazine 
(N.  S.),  Vol.  IV.  p.  575; 
Vol.  V.  pp.  237-559,  De 
Quincey  ;  Vol.  XV.  p.  782. — 
Universalist  Quarterly,  Vol. 
II.  p.  289,  M.  Davis  ;  Vol. 
XI.  p.  90,  J.  Washburne  ; 
Vol.  XVII.  p.  113,  A.  L. 
Barry. — LJarper's  Magazine, 
Vol.  XXI.  p.  Sii  ;  Vol.  LIV. 
p.  916 ;  Vol.  LV.  p.  464 
[Easy  Chair]. 

A     Memoir.       By    Barry 

Cornwall.  British  Quarter- 
ly Review,  Vol.  XLV.  p. 
32>S-— Living  Age  [Littell's], 
Vol.  XC.  p.  ^11.— Edin- 
burgh Review,  Vol.  CXXIV, 
p.  261. 

—  About  Essayists  and  Re- 
viewers.— Charles  Lamb. 
Bentley's  Magazine,  Vol. 
XXIX.  p.  430. 

—  About.        Eclectic  Alaira- 


zine,  Vol.  LXXVIII.  p. 
675.  —  Temple  Bar,  Vol. 
LXXXV.  p.  33. 

An     Autobiographical 

Sketch.  New  Monthly  Mag  ■ 
azine  [Colburn's],  V^ol. 
XLIII.  p.  499. 

Ainger's    Life    of.       The 

Acadetny,  Vol.  XXI.  p.  i63, 
R.  C.  Browne. —  l^he  Athe- 
ncEum,  Vol.  I.  p.  371  [1882]. 

and  Dr.  Johnson.  Tem- 
ple Bar,  Vol.  LXXXVI.  p. 
237,  P.  W.  Roose. 

and       George       Wither. 

N'ineteenth  Century,  Vol. 
XVII.  p.  66,  A.  C.  Swin- 
burne. 

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PH4863  1^3    1890 
Martin,  Benjamin  Ellis, 
d.  1909. 

In  the  footprints  of  Charles 
Lamb, 


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